


Consummation Devoutly To Be Wished

by dorothy_notgale and Tromperie (dorothy_notgale)



Series: To Die as Lovers May [6]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Cisswap, Dubious Consent, F/F, Genderfuck, Intimate partner abuse, Marriage, Misogyny, Rule 63, Sex workers, The Rue Royale Years, Transmasculine Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-09
Updated: 2016-09-08
Packaged: 2018-08-13 23:55:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7991002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale%20and%20Tromperie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lestat and Louisa spent 70 years together, years of love and hate, lost connections and near misses.<br/>And Claude makes three.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Get Thee To A Nunnery

It had been the money, after all. For Louisa, the realization was a bitter one, tinged with irony.

In life, she'd held suspicions of any man who got near enough to consider courting her. How funny that in death, she'd found a woman seeking the same.

For the moment Lestat had gotten Louisa in her clutches, damned and foolish, things had changed. There were no more feverish nights of persuasion, Louisa laid out hearing through a haze promises of love, eternal life, and a cessation of all pain. Her tempting angel was still as beautiful and shocking as ever, but she did not often gift Louisa anymore with kisses full of tender fire, nor gentle touches that drew her in. Now she was Louisa's 'companion,' kept to care for her in her frailty, with aged father in tow. Beneficiary of Louisa's largesse, and a harmless near-scandal in her breeches and finery.

A handsome woman, except on nights like this, when she wasn't.

Louisa had heard of succubi and incubi, demons who seduced and stole and changed for their sleep-frozen victims. This--this was not seductive.

This was.  _ Offensive. _

Her money, her home, her hospitality, all turned over to--

The girl giggled from the couch in the suite of rooms Louisa had reassigned to herself and her 'nurse,' a stockinged leg slung over one of Lestat's.

"You're lying!" She had a laugh that Louisa thought must've been practiced, too easy and meaningless and key to her profession. 

Lestat was soaking in it like sunlight. "By God's hand, cherie. I had just surrendered myself to the madame's tender mercies," her hand crept up the girl's leg, fingering the ragged lace before plucking one tie of the garter free, "when we heard her husband's step on the stairs. I was forced to flee across the rooftops to safety, dressed only in my socks!"

The girl covered her mouth, pink and alive and unwitting of her doom. "I should have liked to see it!"

"Perhaps you will." Lestat leaned in, intimate as a lover and not a customer, and nuzzled at her neck. Louisa knew what she was after, but the girl only shuddered and sighed. "She wasn't half so lovely as you."

"Or your lady wife?" The girl shot back slyly, and Louisa was startled into giving those mortal senses credit. She'd thought herself well hidden. 

"Alas, I am unmarried, darling. The keeper of my heart is a cruel mistress." Lestat's eyes met hers, still nearly as fierce a shock as the first time. "Mme. de Pointe du Lac. Please, won't you join us? This young lady is really quite scintillating."

"’Madame,’ Lestat, truly? Have I grown so hopeless already?" She moved out of the doorway, knowing her dark green velvet dress and hair would have blended into the shadows. It must have been her skin which gave her away. "And here I'd still been holding out hope to marry for love."

Lestat's face twitched with some petty irritation, ugly as it could be behind the girl's back. "My mistake, Mademoiselle. Shall we discuss how you might or might not make an eligible match?"

Louisa forced down her immediate impulse to shock or dismay. What could this poor girl do? Carry the tale of Louisa's ruination far and wide to the  _ docks, _ talk to the very sort of men who'd enacted it?

Instead, she smiled graciously. "Enchante, mademoiselle. I don't believe I've had the pleasure, and Lestat has neglected to introduce us. You are?"

Pretty girl, dewy and young. Big almond-shaped eyes, shiny black hair falling from a hasty pinned-up coil. Smiling, still, but a bit confused when Louisa reached out for her hand with its little crocheted glove, fingers cut out so their skin touched.

The girl gasped. "Madame--Mademoiselle, you are so cold!"

"A condition of heartbreak, I'm afraid," Lestat smiled nastily. "She's had no one to warm her frozen heart."

Louisa started to fire back, to rise to the bait of Lestat's petty taunts as she had in the past. And then a better thought stole over her. "I'm afraid I am not well, my dear." She drew away, feeling the fractional following the girl's fingers made, an entrancement even she didn't seem to realize. "It is...difficult to brave society in my condition. Lestat has been kind enough to bring me," (a careful inability to make eye contact), "companionship."

The girl looked puzzled, and Louisa took the moment to lean close and kiss her. "My apologies," she breathed against the poor victim's lips. "Have I shocked you?" 

Her eyes were wide and strange, and Louisa sensed she was being gifted something true beneath the facade. Louisa made her voice heavy with mourning, hating herself more each minute for the savage pleasure it gave her to see Lestat's stunned silence. "Seeing your sweet face...forgive me. I couldn't help myself."

"I--I see," the girl said swallowing thickly. "You are--"

"Lonely." Louisa turned away slowly, hand trailing behind until caught by Lestat's little toy. "Forgive me; I never intended to interrupt." She cast her gaze up to Lestat. "You may proceed without my interference, Monsieur. Far be it from me to take your pleasure away, when you have given me so very much."

"Oh, don't  _ go _ so soon," Lestat said nastily, leaning forward and taking up a pointless-yet-stylish glass of red wine. "Surely we can amuse you in some way." She tugged the girl--Helene, must have been a whisper, the way the name made its way into Louisa's mind--back by her skirt, to land on the edge of the couch. Helene squeaked, reaching out for the broken contact with Louisa.

"I--yes, Mademoiselle." She looked strangely earnest as she leaned forward. "Is there nothing...?"

Louisa bit her lip, allowing the reluctance she felt to show through clearly. "Nothing easily granted. My condition... I eat little, and cannot abide wine. My only pleasures are company, and I would not impose upon you for the world." She feigned a shallow, consumptive breath. "Forgive me."

Strong, thin fingers, grasping, fastened about her wrist then.

"I make for excellent company," Helene whispered. Louisa could see Lestat holding back a laugh, just barely contained behind her fangs. A prostitute begging to be used. How droll. How like Lestat, to catch mortals between her paws and bleed the life from them. 

There was no chance the girl might live. If Louisa warned her now, Lestat would catch her before she left the room; might snap her neck and take no blood at all, just to prove Louisa’s efforts were meaningless. But Louisa could give her some small pleasure. More, she could deny Lestat hers. 

"Oh, sweet girl." Louisa sank to her knees, her fine velvet making Helene's bold colored skirt look all the more gaudy. "Your kindness is more balm than you know." She grasped the hand holding hers and kissed it, coaxing an earnest pink blush that unmasked her affections all the more. And Louisa could see that her 'companion' knew it. 

"Mademoiselle..."

"Please," she pressed each roughened fingertip to her lips, smelling the despair of lifetimes under the residue of a cold midnight dinner, "call me by my Christian name." It would help to remind Louisa of her damnation, as if her cruelty weren't proof enough. "Call me Louisa." 

Helene repeated it dutifully, eyes wide and almost glassy. Lestat snorted, face set in a scowl, and it shook her from her reverie. "Please!" she hurriedly knelt at Louisa's side, reaching for the fastenings of her bodice with some hesitation. "Please, let me."

Louisa, for all her dead body and cold cynicism, could not help but shiver feeling the garment loosen and give way. Not like being undressed by a maid; this was exploratory, lingering, and when Helene pulled the stiffened canvas stays out and away her hands returned to rub gently over the thin fabric of her chemise, soothing the impressed marks in Louisa's skin. Louisa focused wholly on the poor doomed girl so as not to succumb to the urge to check Lestat's grey, sparkling eyes for a sign as to her thinking. Would she be intrigued? Admiring? Irritated at losing her prey, or worse,  _ bored _ by this vile whim of her misbegotten fledgling?

Helene's breath was a bit shallow as her touch moved, changing subtly but surely from a desire to heal to something more, a soft squeezing advance. Her red, living lips parted, showing teeth and the wine-stained tongue peeking between, and her sloe eyes played upon Louisa like a physical force.

There was no shame, she told herself, in the small sound that escaped her when Helene leaned in and sent a warm breath over Louisa's coldness. Nothing wrong in accepting a second kiss, when she'd already done and would do so much worse.

"I've never..." the poor girl breathed, and Louisa let herself hold that warm body close. She found herself taken in by a strange fantasy of protecting this innocent, shielding her from Lestat's ire and the whole world. Undoing one brick in the great wall of her evil. 

"There, there," she soothed, and was surprised when hot hands slid along her thighs, under the falsely clean white of her undergarments. 

Helene still wore that wide-eyed expression (too wide, too simple, for the way her hands held Louisa now). "Louisa, please. Won't you let me kiss you?" 

She moved forward to oblige, but Helena was moving out of her grasp, kissing down, raising the fabric of her skirts. A spike of panicked uncertainty struck Louisa's heart. What would this poor soul find, touching a dead girl? Coldness, dead and unresponsive, surely. Or--

She saw a spectre of her murdered crimes, growing again and trying to claw its way out, to feed and convert with hungry teeth and terrible blue eyes.

"No--No, my dear, it is--" she closed her eyes and pulled Helene back up with near desperation, bringing her hands to the cheap dress with its frayed ribbons and mended seams to mirror the work of removal. Warm, living girl, flesh she could bare and look upon to chase away those spectres.

She ignored a chuckle from somewhere outside the moment she spent with a girl who would allow this, but when they were both bare to the waist Lestat's amused, patronizing voice cut in.

"Much as I understand your enthusiasm, ladies, perhaps you would be more comfortable if you adjourned to the bed, hmm?"

She was so beautiful, lounging on the couch in a slump that spoke of nothing so much as apathy, malice glittering low in her eyes. Helene shrank a little, into Louisa's arms, and said, "I'm sorry, Monsieur. I did not intend to become so--distracted, if you require attention also."

Louisa wanted to shrink as well, from the tantalizing vagueness of possibility, Lestat holding her suspended with it until she rolled her eyes and waved an elegant hand covered in rings bought with Louisa's money.

"I was merely offering advice, and the use of my bed. Goodness knows it needs to be put to its rightful purposes. And what better than to see such a matched set of lovelies frolicking there?"

They both colored, both dread fallen women, and unconsciously covered their breasts as they made their way over to it.

The bed, like all the wasteful things Lestat would never use, was an ostentatious-verging-on-vulgar showpiece, all dark masculine carvings and blue velvet drapes, and they were dwarfed when they fell upon the mattress. Helene seemed--different, suddenly, more wary and self-conscious. When she pressed against Louisa's coldness, her dark nipples hardened to match the vampire's own.

It was almost unbearable to have her near this way, her heart beating a symphony in Louisa's ears, clouding her mind. She had drunk from chickens and rats and the small creatures that prowled the edges of the plantation, but this. 

This was the sweetest music she had ever heard; no, that had ever been written. She wanted to weep at how beautiful the woman in her arms was, now stroking her hair and planting kisses on her cold flesh, valiantly pretending she hadn't noticed. 

Louisa wanted to hold her, feel the heat of her blood spilling and rock them both through a final pleasure greater than any pretended climax. 

She saw those grey eyes watching her, knowing, and she broke, pushing Helene away from her with the smallest sob. 

"What's the matter?" the doomed girl asked. "Have I hurt you?"

"Yes, whatever is the matter?" Lestat was stalking toward the bed, dangerous predatory gaze masked as indulgence. "You look as if you've seen the Devil, my lady." 

She couldn't bear it: the hunger, the endless meaningless nights, the cruel caprices of the creature staring down at her. 

"Please." There again, that strange sincerity apart from the practiced coyness. "What is it?"

"You are so lovely, Helene, and I cannot--"

"She is lovely indeed," Lestat said, crawling up onto the mattress to unpin Helene's hair and send it tumbling down her shoulders, over her body like spilt ink. This was more intimate, somehow, than the baring of bodies as one might when swimming or bathing. "I'd thought her suited to your taste, Louisa. Your particular girlish fancies, those you so dote upon."

Lestat's hands on Helene's body were more certain by far than Louisa's, dragging the poor little soiled dove away to sit upon breech-clad knee. Long, calloused fingers stole up beneath layered skirts, pulled them aside to show garters and rolled stocking-tops and above that, a mossy patch of thick, dark, curled hair, so pretty as Lestat pet it. So vulnerable, as Lestat parted it to reveal damp red flesh, slick with a clear fluid.

Helene's mouth quivered, her one hand grasping at air in Louisa's direction and her other sliding back along Lestat's thigh towards that selfsame location.

_ Save me, _ the girl seemed to say but didn't, and when Louisa reached out to clasp her hand Helene tried to draw her into another kiss, into the wicked circle of Lestat's arms. 

Part of her wanted to watch it unfold, caught in perverse curiosity as to what this unsuspecting lamb would think of her "monsieur" laid bare. But Lestat grasped that questing hand and brought it to her mouth instead, drawing those delicate fingers between her lips; Louisa knew she'd drawn blood before the smell reached her, recognizing the jolt in Helene's spine. 

"Forgive me, cherie," Lestat purred, releasing her. The little droplets of red made Louisa dizzy. "I found myself simply wishing to devour you." She pressed her nose to that  dark hair, inhaling. "What fine beauty. You were made for halls like this. Fine clothing. Fine food. Fine lovers." Lestat's hand stroked between Helene's legs as she spoke, twisting the scent of blood with arousal as Louisa stared on like a mourner waiting for the death. Yearning, twisted herself.

"Mademoiselle--Louisa, please, what troubles you so? Will you not...?" Her ribs showed about the hollow of her belly as Lestat's fingers slipped deeper, disappearing into that wondrous space Louisa knew so little of beyond that she'd wanted it when she lived.

(She and Babette had shared nearly everything, during the scant few years before Paul severed their connection, but not this. Never this. A few kisses, handclasps, pledges of letter-writing and eternal friendship--lies, of course, but so precious in their girlish naivete.)

"Please, Louisa," Helene whispered, and Louisa leaned in, straddling Lestat's leg, and kissed the darling creature's breastbone just above the heart. The feel of the racing pulse traveled through her lips, and she kissed again, and again, bore the weak gentle body down beneath her with ears full of murmurs and cries until her ministrations were interrupted by a cry of shock.

"Mademoiselle, you weep! Please, what is wrong?" Helene enfolded  _ her, _ pulled  _ her _ away across the mattress, hands trying to tilt Louisa's face up that their eyes might meet. "Does this--Is this not--" Her pulse raced, hot, hot beneath the skin, burning to the touch, so different from her next harsh whisper. "Mademoiselle, is this not your choice?"

"No, it," it was too much what she wanted and would now never have. She hadn't seen Babette since the Freniere brother had attempted his courting and Paul had done his duty to "protect” her. She had never touched a woman this way, never knew even to fantasize those acts that Lestat had made vulgar and cheap. She blinked, and her vision blurred. Red-tinted droplets fell, all but invisible against the dark blue of the bedding. 

"Here," Helene drew her close, her hold a mere comfort. "Please. Tell me, mademoiselle." 

"I never wished--Lestat insisted on it, all of this."  

She turned, poor brave (doomed) thing, to face Lestat. "I'll not be party to this wickedness."

Lestat laughed. "Do you not know what you are?" 

"I do." Her back seemed straighter, defending an irredeemable monster in disguise. "I only touch those willing. I won't be made to do otherwise."

"No," Lestat lunged, gripping her throat, the hint of her fangs glinting in the dim light. "Do you know what you are?"

"Lestat, please--" It was futile to intercede, yet Louisa did it anyway. It hadn't gone too far yet, the girl could be paid and sent off none the wiser from the dark house with its sad Lady and her cruel, rich Gentleman Keeper. Ordinary, as so many things that should not be were.

She felt the blood tears spatter her breasts, dripping down, cold and coagulating because of course it had gone too far; it had been over the moment Lestat found poor sweet Helene, with her heat and fright and pitiable morals. Any objection was mere playacting.

"'Lestat, please,'" Louisa's tormenter mimicked eerily, holding Helene with the ease of one scruffing a kitten. Helene's nails broke as she clawed at that implacable grip. "Would you have me spare this one then, for you to keep as a pet? Perhaps you could pretend to make love to her, in your disappointment over your thwarted love-match with Freniere." Her voice lowered into something like a snarl. "Or did you simply want me to kill her before she realized she's nothing but a little pink pig to the slaughter?"

Helene was weeping her own tears in earnest now, unable to speak but choking out animal cries of fright. Louisa reached out, unsure of whom she wanted to hold. "It--you'll get us noticed. She was seen coming in, they'll know no one left." 

"And they won't care." Lestat's eyes were ablaze, as if fired by Hell itself. "I could kill a hundred whores and it would never touch us. How many slave girls vanished at your father's hand, Louisa? How many lives has this plantation consumed? Your nobility is a sham, and you are a killer." She threw Helene into Louisa's open arms, and the girl clung and shook. "It's time you learned to get your hands dirty."

"Please, help me. You have to," Helene's voice was still cracking and dry. She'd never be able to scream.

"I won't do this. You can't make me do this." But oh, how she wanted to. How delicious that blood smelled.

"You  _ asked _ me for this, don't you dare forget that!" Lestat rose, standing over them both. "Kill her, or I'll kill everyone in this house."

"And will you begin with me?" Louisa said lowly, clutching Helene to her and feeling her tainted blood smear between them. Helene's hands pushed at her, too, her pretty features twisted in fear at the sight of the hideous inhuman weeping. Finally realized she was surrounded by monsters. "Finish what you started?"

Lestat's white face, floating above her black finery, went shocked and enraged, and she struck out so fast Louisa's own head spun with the blow, her cheek reddened by it while Helene flew across the room to crash against Lestat's wardrobe.

"How dare you," Lestat hissed. "You ungrateful little wench. I give you the whole world, and you throw it--"

"You  _ lied _ to me, ‘Monsieur!’" she shouted at last, regretting it in an instant, because fighting was not her place, not when there were better ways to get what one wants. (Not that they worked much, not that it would keep anyone safe, but--)

"I've told you all you need to know." A queer, faraway expression turned Lestat's visage into a mask.

"You told me that it wouldn't hurt!"

"It shouldn't have!" Honesty was rarer than gold, than any of the fine items in the whole estate, and Lestat seemed frightened by it. "You shouldn't--you didn't tell me about that  _ thing!" _

Louisa still remembered, vividly, the look of disgust on Lestat's face as she'd quickened, as if she were the monster. "I didn't..." but she'd suspected, hadn't she. All her disbelief hadn't protected her, and now it poisoned even her death. "Why didn't you help me?"

She'd never seen such a look on Lestat’s face--stricken, almost, one hand raised  in hesitant comfort--

And quickly gone again, contorting in pain as Helene dug a hairpin into Lestat's neck from behind. "Monster!"

The word sounded so simple, too small when spoken aloud. Louisa heard herself cry out, paralyzed as Lestat stumbled and then rounded on the girl, returning a wound for a wound and nearly tearing her pretty head from her body in the process. The pair of them dropped to the carpet, one dead and the other uncertain, and only then could Louisa find the strength to move.

"Lestat!" She fell, ungainly, to the floor, kneeling beside her terrible creator. "Lestat, please, stay still."

Lestat did; too still, as Louisa pushed her vibrant yellow hair aside and sought where the bit of metal protruded. She pulled it free, growing paradoxically weak and yet energized with the scent of blood that followed, great gouts over her hands.

Sticky and slick and  _ wet _ as she bent over Lestat, wondering at all she didn't know about how this worked because Lestat hadn't told her, and she was praying without meaning it, lips shaping the words as they had when Father fell, when Paul did, praying for the one who had done these horrors and increasingly seemed the only one who could see Louisa for herself after all.

_ Please, please, let her live--Let this not kill her--Let me not be alone, even if it must be painful for my sins-- _

She pressed her hands to her mouth.

"--d." Lestat's voice was a rattle, barely more than air. 

"Don't speak, please. Save your strength." But the noise came again, and she leaned down in spite of herself.

Lestat moved fast as a snake, fastening onto her neck as she hadn't since that fateful joining. She drank what felt like gallons, and Louisa soon had no strength to protest. No desire, with the sweet ache of Lestat against her. She deserved this. This pain and paradoxical pleasure. 

Her vision went hazy at the edges, and she prayed that this might be death at last even as she clung to Lestat, to living death.

Her body felt heavy and distant, a living sleep, and the next sensation she knew was the familiar watery sustenance of blood. Animal blood, pressed to her open, hungry mouth.

"Little fool." Her head was pillowed on something soft, someone's hand cradling her head as she sucked like an infant learning to live again.

A great tenderness welled in her chest, a gentle fearful adoration, and she didn't understand from whence it came but felt shaken by it nonetheless.

And when the flesh against her lips was stolen away, she  _ moaned _ for its loss, still dazed and famished. But Lestat's face came into focus at last, stern and weirdly sensitive as she wrapped the extravagant bedspread about Louisa's shoulders, heedless of the blood that would stain it.

"Lestat..." She should get up, preserve some semblance of propriety in this Hell, but. Just a moment. Just one more moment, with her head resting on the breast of this magnificent creature, smelling blood, cologne, and clean linens while gentle fingers stroked through her hair, catching on pins here and there. She was so very tired.

She might be kept for only one reason, but she had always been one to find the small moments that felt good, and she made herself accept them as compensation. So it had been Before; so it was now.

"Well. That's quite enough of that," Lestat said briskly, tone edged and nervous. Louisa flinched as though struck and tried to comply, but despite the words she was held close still. "Your blood's far too thin even to bother drinking. Surely you see, now,  _ why _ you must feed properly."

"To be of use to you?"

There was a pause, and she couldn't see Lestat's face. "Yes," that same brusque voice said at last. "Your blood is my blood. It should be strong. There will be many such times as this that we will need to share it." 

She thought of the wondrous pleasure of that joining, new and different without the terror of dying around it. She thought of the terror she had felt as she grew powerless. 

She thought of poor Helene, and her grief. How that had alchemized into a quicksilver wish for her death at the sight of Lestat bleeding and gasping. Had she always been as such? Had the blood transformed her, even that little bit?

"I'm sorry." It was all she could say. 

"Here. Let me show you." And Lestat pulled her collar away from her neck, where just minutes or hours before there had been that great fatal wound. 

And Louisa, to the damnation of them both, flinched.

Lestat went still, then shoved her away into the pillows, back to the bed. "Fine. Languish like one of your precious mortals. Enjoy your suffering. Your dearest love."

It would not be the last time Lestat had need of her, though while Louisa refused to hunt among humans Lestat did try, she said, not to prevail too often. Sometimes there was an injury, others--

Louisa was Lestat's fledgling, and knew only so much as her maker allowed. If the periodic renewal was what was needed, the return of her blood to its font, she could abide it (and more.)

And on occasion Lestat would bring home mortals, beautiful and frail and breathing, like a mother cat proffering wounded birds to her young.

Lestat almost always took her in that way when she refused, sometimes even feeding the blood back to her in shows of strength or nurturing or who knew what.

All Louisa knew was that those moments were painful and secretly treasured, that when they became more--more erotic, more forbidden, when she could induce Lestat to touch her during and make it feel  _ good _ above the utilitarian aspects--she felt a burning in her dead skin, like that she'd always felt at the sight of a beautiful girl's ankle, a pretty mouth near her own. Like the hands on her and the things in her she'd used to destroy herself, that left her wanton easy prey for her angel of Hell.


	2. Something Rotten

Sending young, sandy-haired Mr. Fairfax of Virginia into their home unchaperoned was, in retrospect, a mistake. 

Fairfax was a cad and more. Lestat had been 'lucky' enough to make his acquaintance at one of the many social functions they attended, with the circles of merchants, now, rather than the plantation owners.

The move into town  _ was _ an improvement in many ways. No risk of seeing the remaining Freniere girls Louisa had so longed and mourned for, no need to pretend civility to Louisa's wretched mother. 

It was a game, so Lestat thought. Or a joke. It was above all meant as a cure.

For sweet Louisa had been holding on to sobriety, starving herself night after night on vermin and pets. Refusing to touch the only thing that could lift her constant misery or pierce the muffling veil of darkness over her. She’d not touched real, human blood since her frenzy the night the plantation burned. Too long, for one yet in her infancy, and she was so awfully frail.

(But so irritating, floating through their shared lives handling the finances and the servants, the household matters and the social entanglements. Terribly important, supposedly, for their new identities. The useless busywork of sewing, sitting in her chair silent by the fire picking away at some piece of linen whenever she noticed Lestat’s dislike of her endless reading.)

She occupied herself with everything but herself and Lestat. And so when Lestat saw an opportunity to push her into the proper actions of a vampire, perhaps to fill her with the fire and blood and passion she remembered desiring ten long years ago, she did not even wish to resist.

The hunting was rich; easier thievery for Lestat, easier moneyspinning for Louisa (of course she  _ must _ , acquisitive little accountant.)

Men like Fairfax were a dime a dozen, as was true everywhere. It was less the question of whether evil was about, than the way its stench rose from him, smug and satisfied and sure of its rightness. He'd outraged plenty of girls in his day.

And he thought Lestat quite the man after his own heart, when she laughed loud and admired the ladies with him, arm about his shoulders and fingers picking his pocket. His clumsy French (muddled with Spanish when he drank and forgot which group's party he frequented) wrapped about filthy, gleeful words like his eyes and hands wrapped around the girls in their dresses like magnolia blossoms.

She'd wanted to kill him as they sat in conversation, his voice low and lustful as he described how sweet it was when they struggled, when they knew at last it was hopeless and succumbed, how some of them ended it in cries of pleasure like the sluts he'd always known they were. Lestat felt molding red velvet against her face and violence in her veins, barely contained as he touched her (safe, saved by her disguise which was her truth). 

They were alone at the time. It would've been simple. In the clamor outside, no one would notice a few guests vanishing. But as the slime began another story, of a woman he had met wandering the streets,  _ begging _ to be taken in hand, she had another idea.

As always, her mistakes were spectacular, impulsive, and half-well-meaning. Half, for the remainder was spite.

_ Anything _ could have happened to the woman he described, with her glossy hair and full, plush body, wasp waist and soft, bruisable-peach flesh. Anything  _ had _ happened, once upon a time--and when he saw that very woman swan through the gathering and experienced a surge of lust so intense Lestat felt dirtied yet aroused by it in turn, how could she resist?

He was so clearly evil, so capable of inspiring killing rage with the smallest brush of minds. He was perfect.

And they never locked their door at night, anyway.

She'd made the bargain low and whispered as he looked at her with the sickening familiarity of a fellow monster. She looked forward to his death, even as she drank in the vicarious feel of watching him cage her beloved, enflamed by her struggles.

And Louisa, meant to take her part now on the set stage-- _ did nothing, _ shuddered and squirmed against the unwanted touch using thoroughly mortal means. Those and nothing more, when she was within her right to  _ punish _ him, to cow him with one bruising grip at his neck. 

His one hand slid beneath her skirts, his other at his breeches, and Lestat saw something flare out in her love's eyes. some familiar deadness she refused to remember. 

And seeing it all fall apart, she did what was the right of any director. She finished it.

Their parlor would require a great deal of redecorating, after all was said and done and Louisa sat on the floor, stunned in the aftermath of his evisceration.

"Why did you do it, Lestat?"

"For sport--"

"You would make sport of me so?" Louisa's low voice was harsh, wounded, but when  _ wasn’t _ she wounded? How could she stand it, fair painted in blood, drops even at her lips, and yet take no pleasure?

_ He _ was the sport, Lestat meant to say, but.

"How much did he offer you?"

"What?"

"Do not think me stupid, my dearest love." Such weary venom. "Well I know my value to you is in the sphere of finances. Why would you not take such an opportunity? All I wish is to know how little is my worth."

"Nothing--" The lie stuck. $50, American, he'd offered; the $75 she’d gotten sat yet in her pocket. And such a laugh they should have had at his foolishness.

"A pretty thought," Louisa shot back. "So it was for cruelty alone, then?"

Never; entire. No more cruel than sweet Louisa's face wearing such disinterest even as she painted an irresistible portrait: the heavy, clotting blood molding her bodice to her soft breasts, rivulets highlighting the long curve of her neck. How could she not know what power she had, to render Lestat weak in the knees without a single movement?

No one had power over her. She'd  _ seen _ to that. And now, this weak belle.

"It was my right,  _ fledgling." _ The word held such mysticism still for Louisa, even if their bond festered with corruption. God, Lestat wanted to touch her. She would. 

In a breath she strode across the room and put her arm around Louisa's waist, yanking her close. "Be grateful I don't tell you to kneel and kiss my boots. I gave you your life. It belongs to me!" Just as Lestat's heart belonged, entire, to the beauty in her arms. From that first moment.

"What a waste." Louisa's lovely full lips twisted. "You couldn't even find someone worth the effort." She looked bored, bored and pained, and her body was pliant against Lestat's just as it had been in the grasp of that petty monster intended for her supper and her revenge. Could she  _ never _ fight?

(She had. Once. Lestat wanted to  _ see _ it.)

She let her hands roam over blood-sticky fabric, over that body too passive. Escaped (torn) strands of hair stuck to her lips when she hissed,

"Sorry cher, did I remind you of something?"

A little more, and Louisa would feel something. A little more and Lestat would at last quench the needling fires that dogged her. Always it was just over the next hill, the next ounce of damnation. She clamped her lips onto the curve where Louisa's shoulder became her neck, forcing herself not to bite. "What was that?" she pressed when the barest delicious whimper escaped her beloved. Let her beg. Let her remember that she had asked for this, for all of it.

She flicked her tongue out to taste the smeared and drying lifeblood on Louisa's throat, traveled ostentatiously, vulgarly lower, following it down onto her bosom. So pretty, so perfect, and the hand she touched was clenched and trembling and it was  _ so close _ \--

The slap stung hot against her cheek, the shock of it far more potent than the pain. She jerked back, struck dumb for a moment at Louisa's cold stare. Louisa, driven to fight at last: not against that stupid, ugly beast of a mortal with his pawing, artless hands, but against Lestat. The greater monster, apparently. 

It cut to her heart, left her bleeding in a way she struggled not to show  _ (how dare she, how dare--). _ It took all she had to draw herself up tall and snarl, "Clean this up." She couldn't be here, so close to that stare that saw to the heart of her and yet understood nothing.

"Where are you going?" Louisa had the gall to make her curiosity sound earnest.

"To empty the streets. Pray your little rosary for whoever crosses my path." Off to play the wicked monster Louisa saw her as.

She stayed away for a week, slinking home every morning after Louisa already slumbered (so weak, so terribly weak, third of Lestat's blood in only a decade--) and leaving at dusk, muddy bootprints and bloody rags strewn to remind Louisa that the house  _ was _ shared.

The messes were always cleaned; her room aired and neat; and the roses Lestat had once mentioned favoring that had then become one of their weekly purchases remained fresh. The obedience. The  _ propriety _ of it all--

And then she relented, returned home to her chill clockwork darling expecting no welcome at all.

Louisa stood as she entered, hands wringing and worrying behind her back. "You're home."

"What of it?" She glowered, ready to continue their fight. To be rejected again.

"I'm glad." Again that subtle movement of the hands, an aborted step forward. "There've been terrible stories in the papers. I thought--"

She'd worried. It struck Lestat suddenly as a bolt from the blue, dangerously close to her heart. "You forget what we are. If there were any deaths, I would be the cause before the victim." But she came further into the room, drawn by the unnamable force of those vivid eyes.

They cast themselves down, flinching from Lestat's adoring gaze. "I--I know. I know that you are more--capable--than I." Her hands twisted and fretted at a piece of needlepoint or embroidery or whatever useless time-filler. "I should not have. Questioned you." Her poised voice shook, and there was the air of rehearsal to the words. "It was not my place. Next time I--I will try--"

_ Next _ time. Lestat strode forward past mortal speed to grasp soft rounded shoulders, bare arms, and the shake she gave was just to stop the hateful flow of this little speech.

"Never."

Louisa looked so adrift. "I don't-"

"They will never touch you again." Lestat would protect her, but that wasn't what she needed to hear. "You have more power in one of these hands," she laced their fingers together, squeezing tight, "than any of those miserable worms have in their whole bodies." 

"Lestat..." A fraction of an inch of that wary tension melted, just enough for Louisa to lean against her. 

"They deserve death." She seized on the idea then, the opportunity to make her beloved understand as Gabrielle had helped her. "They're predators, the same as us. Think of their victims, with your face and none of your power."

Louisa looked at Lestat then--looked her full in the face as she so rarely did. (Her eyes flitted and flinched, didn't linger except when she forgot herself or remembered herself, whichever meant showing the truth).

"You would have it as a moral choice, then?" Innocent question, curiously so for one so often wrapped in thoughts of sin and damnation.

"Well, of course," Lestat replied, wrapping an arm about uncloaked shoulders. So domestic, this dress, as though their kind needed any such garments; anything besides the most wonderful finery. When had she even had it made? "It's killing; what else would it be?"

Louisa licked her lips. "It is not... aesthetical."

"Aesthetical."

"The experience of such killings would not be pleasing to me." She flushed, almost shy rather than secretive as usual. "I do not wish to do what I must to entice them, nor do I relish their violence within me as you do."

"I think you could use a bit more violence, ma cherie." Lestat made her voice tender as she brought their lips together, speaking so closely it was half a kiss already. "I think you need to remember what you are."

Such a shudder, then, such a sob when the hand in hers shot up to fist in her hair. Such a total collapse of that beautiful body's defenses.

Louisa was a creature ever in mourning for her mortality, evident in her gaze and her dress and the dull proclamations of their damnation. But her mouth was sweet with blood, the unnecessary gasp torn from her as they met more beautiful than the finest music of the symphony. Lestat's finest, perfect victim. 

In spite of herself Lestat wanted to be gentle, to cherish this rare and fragile chance. But she had promised violence, and where would Louisa be without her wicked villain? Lestat backed her toward the wall, sucking hard at her lips until they had a pretty, mortal flush. Her nails tore at the ridiculous puffs of Louisa's somber dress, revealing the soft shoulders beneath. 

"If you want me gone," she rumbled against Louisa's neck, "then fight me."

"Ah!" So throaty, the moans; Louisa's voice was the smoky seduction of tobacco or liquor, far lower than Lestat's own high, pure soprano. "I thought--"

_ "Stop _ thinking." Thinking got one nowhere; it was action that furthered one, saved one, and so Lestat gathered those voluminous skirts in her hand and used them to pull her lover tight. Trapped, she was, in those yards of strong fabric which would tear like gossamer if she truly pulled away.

A pleasing image, that.

The scent of blood was around them somewhere. From the tiny healing cuts in full lips, or perhaps the memory of the first time Lestat had seen her broken angel pressed against a wall, alive and drunk and dying of despair.

(She had drunk deep of that man's memories, reveled in recalling every thrust he'd made into the woman who would be hers.)

A hand rose, up, pressed against her own chest, and she braced for the fight, but instead it... traveled. Touched, over her coat and waistcoat and shirt. Over the  _ bandages. _

"Why do you wear them?" Her thumb stroked the ridges of the wrapping through Lestat’s clothing. 

"Can't you ever have done with your incessant questions?" Lestat didn't want to think of the cold mountains of Auvergne, of her father who'd wanted a son and her mother who'd wanted no children at all. Nicki, who'd wanted  _ her _ until Lestat poisoned it all--A shock of unexpected air hit her, a sense of coming undone, and she looked down to see that Louisa had cut through her shirt and the bandages beneath. Already her flattened breasts were reforming into the modest curve they'd had the night she died. Soft. Vulnerable. "You little-" 

Louisa's eyes were rapt, her mouth parted ever so slightly; she stared as if Lestat were some new person, not the same tyrant with one less protection. And choosing then, of all times, to take Lestat's words to heart, she reached out and laid a hand against Lestat's chest. 

The soreness was a phantom pain, surely, but it was still a struggle not to flinch. Louisa's cool hands were gentle, not squeezing but only holding, running her hand along skin as if Lestat were one of her books to be studied and learned.

Lestat's own breath came faster, faster, harsh through her nose, and she felt her face twist into a snarl, not that Louisa was looking at her  _ face. _ The feeling was pleasurable. Tentative.

Unbearable, and so she snatched both Louisa's wrists in a single fist and pinned them above that pretty head. Plaster cracked and the dust turned grey the hair Lestat had taken such care to save from aging.

"How  _ dare _ you," she hissed. "I told you to fight me, you little bitch, and you do this underhand conniving--"

She had once beaten Armida's pretty face against paving-stones in this state. But then, she hadn't loved Armida.

The kiss she took was as cruel as the air on her exposed bosom. And Louisa's body rose against hers, even as those wrists flexed and twisted, worked themselves raw and bruised and hot against her merciless grasp.

"What's that, precious?" she asked when they broke, staring into deep green pools filmed with red. "Will you fight?"

*"Non."*

It struck her that she had broken her love, that she could beat this fragile heart black and blue and have no response but coldness. Louisa couldn't be allowed to be cold, not when she was so much more alive than the rest of them. 

"'Non,'" she mocked, her own native tongue always sounding a mockery next to Louisa's soft drawl. She pulled, hard, using her grip on Louisa's wrists to drag her to the couch--the very same one where that man had sat, fooled into thinking he was anything more than meat. 

She threw Louisa down, straddling her hips to hold her still. Lestat could see the bruises she'd left trying to heal even as she made new ones, caging Louisa with a hand on either side of her head. "Would you still refuse?" 

Louisa was wearing that strange, unknowable look, staring past Lestat's threats to the place where her hair had come undone (when it was down, she was told, she looked so much like her mother).

"Well?" She demanded, the musical pitch of her voice becoming almost a shriek (a *harpy,* they'd call her, shrill and nagging; in France she would be wrung out and dead, she was glad for what Magnus had done to her, she -)

"Why are you looking at me like that?" 

Louisa's hand raised, halting, to trace her face: her long nose, her high cheekbones, the broad expanse of her lip...

Lestat couldn't bear tenderness: She'd never been given it, and there was always a trick beneath. She grabbed Louisa's hand and bit it savagely, drawing another cry like the anguish of a falling angel. "Was it all nothing, then?" she demanded. "Your desire for life eternal is done away so simply as this? By some gutter mongrel?" She was shaking her prey again, hardly aware she was doing it. "Or do you want to see your dear, sainted brother again that much? Let him finish what he started?" She couldn't stop herself. She drew back her hand, as if to strike Louisa through the heart. "Well, cherie, I can arrange--"

"No!" At last, at last a reaction, so strong it sent Lestat tumbling back, reversed their positions entirely. What remained of Lestat's shirt was shredded in the struggle, exposing her heart and her shame beside. 

Louisa was looking down at her with wild eyes, darting back and forth, and for a minute Lestat was seized with fury at the mere thought of being overcome. But curiosity, stronger, at the sight of her timid love lorded over her, gave her a fraction of pause.

"I am  _ not _ his! I was never--how could you, Lestat?" She clamped her long legs about Lestat's hips and pulled up on her shoulders. Tears were flowing freely now, hysterical as she'd been thought in life. "Why, why do you--" she mumbled and muttered into Lestat's hair, making it sticky with blood. She reeked of it, rich and vivid, and her hands felt as full of desperation as Lestat was in that moment. So it was Lestat's turn to feign gentleness, filled almost with timidity as she unbuttoned the drab bodice and snapped the laces of Louisa's stays with as much gentleness as possible.

"Why, why, why--" Louisa was still whispering, a harsh meaningless litany, when Lestat touched her icy skin.

And perhaps Lestat needn't do any true violence here, if her beloved flinched so from a mere stroke. If that same beloved then shivered and arched into the hand all the same.

Lestat had no answer for her questions. Louisa still thought her a miracle in preternatural garb, a god descended from on high; as though Louisa hadn't known the beauty of the world from her first night, hadn't poetry that put Lestat's parroting actor's tongue to shame. 

All she could offer was her presence, the fierce physical threat of her existence that strung her beloved's muscles tight with every movement, every caress. Even as she wrapped her arms around Louisa's waist and kissed the cold, deathly skin over her heart. The anticipation was so often sweeter than the actuality--if Louisa ever saw her, truly, fiery and failing and groping like a blind child in the dark, it would dash any love she held for the mercurial force of nature that she perceived as her beautiful jailer. Louisa would never love her then, and Lestat couldn't bear the thought. 

Her fangs never broke the skin as she traced down, kissed and sucked down  the pale expanse of Louisa's stomach in deliberate ignorance of her full, sensitive breasts. Waiting, always, to be asked even as she left no other options but capitulation.

Louisa tensed and relaxed at every touch--responsive or perhaps fearful, who could say?

"Shh, cherie," Lestat whispered against the curve of ribcage, feeling the soft belly tremble with each breath and syllable. "If you will not fight, don't be surprised if someone makes you theirs. In all ways."

"Lestat." Hope of the worst sort flavored Louisa's sweet low voice. A hand touched Lestat's hair, then fluttered away to clutch in skirts instead. "I won't fight. I won't. So please, please--even though I'm not what you wanted. Please, just do what you will."

As if Louisa were not perfectly made to be hers. Oh, to have this creature in life, both of them vibrant and with hearts beating. To kneel and worship between Louisa's pale thighs until they were shaking and damp with sweat and other things. 

But there were other pleasures left to them yet. It was a pleasure to grasp hard at those voluminous skirts and tear at them like fine wrapping paper, the shredded remains that clung about Louisa's bodice more lurid than if she had been nude. Her undergarments were plain and white, a blight on the fine form they covered. Lestat reveled in raking her nails over Louisa's stomach (where a child might have grown, had--what an idea, that, Louisa as a mother). The dark drops ran down and past Lestat's lips, turning Louisa's slip and drawers red-black and sticky. And she moaned through it, shuddering and rocking her hips against a subtly invading tongue. 

Always, with every move Lestat made, came that hand: reaching out only to retreat, each cry bitten back. Stolen. 

Lestat took the challenge in turn, determined to have her reward. She moaned low in her throat as she sat up, her hands wrapping around the curve of Louisa's buttocks and pressing them closer together. A parody of lovemaking. A truth of it. She could see precious blood staining her beloved's cheeks.

"You are so wondrous, my dear. Fathomless." The tears sparkled on Lestat's tongue.

"Such flattery," Louisa whispered. "Why do you--there's no need. I'm already yours." Her body rose and pressed nonetheless.

"You've always been mine. Since the first time I saw you." Her slim neck bent so sweetly in response to  Lestat's seeking nuzzles. "I enjoy telling you of it. I'd tell all the world."

"But  _ why--" _

And then Lestat dug in claws and fangs, lioness on gazelle.

She tumbled her beloved to the carpet, losing herself for a moment as if Louisa were a mere mortal victim, only that. Their bodies rose and fell together, heaving air they didn't need, and there seemed as much blood spilled as Lestat swallowed greedily down. 

Louisa's thoughts were despair itself, not blackness but gossamer and moonlight, a fine mist that muddled the mind and brought madness. 

And then she was too deep, too far, lost in that softness of another and Louisa was beating at her shoulders, crying that it hurt, it burned, her very veins were empty--

\--they broke apart, Louisa's trusting eyes wild and staring at the rouge of blood on Lestat's lips. Weak, unbearably weak, Louisa stumbled toward the window, and the sight of Lestat reaching for her seemed only to strengthen her need to be gone.

"Why?"

"You were too much. I was overcome--"

"Why do you hate me so, yet never have  _ done _ with me?" Louisa hissed, vain attempts at hiding her nakedness rendering her a veritable Venus emerging from the waves. “Is it some part of the magic between us, that you are trapped so long as I want you?"

"You want me?" Stupid, stupid to expose that hope. Particularly with all else she'd suffered having exposed this night.

"My dear master, life without you would be even more unbearable." The loneliness in Louisa's eyes, and voice, and bearing--she'd been practically a prisoner even in life, on that rotten-to-the core plantation in which she'd taken such pride.

"Louisa," her name like a prayer, a litany. "Louisa, come out with me. Kill with me." If only they could seal that bond together, that closest to sacred act among their kind, it could be healed. Louisa would let go of that fetid humanity she clung to, and Lestat could at last be a teacher as she so craved. No, not a teacher--Lestat had no patience for students, had been driven from the schools. But they might see it side by side, as equals. 

(Master, she said, and a traitorous part of Lestat said yes--let her think that, if it will keep her close. Let her worship me, if it will feel anything like love). 

"Is that why you did it?" Louisa whispered. She was gnawing at her lip - the hunger must have been unbearable. "So that I would…?" 

No, no, she wanted to shout. It had been nothing but love, purest passion. But she feared already that Louisa had been lying, that she would shy from her declaration of love as easily as she did killing. "You can't chase rats forever, Louisa," she said instead.

"All for my own  _ good, _ then. Reminding me what I truly am." She shook as though fevered. As though on the edge of death. Why couldn't they go back--she'd been so dear in that state, clinging to Lestat's promises and at least half in love.

"A vampire." Reverence still crept into Lestat’s voice when speaking the word.

"A murderess." Louisa spat in her turn. "A tramp. A--"

"Beloved, no. No." Lestat stepped forward, shirt clutched closed. "A  _ vampire. _ Let your aesthetics guide you if you must--kill tender things, avoid the violence that pains you so--but please. You are ill!"

"I cannot." She staggered, swaying on her feet. "I  _ will not _ succumb to this evil." 

"There is no evil, but thinking makes it so." Lestat half-quoted one wiser and more pithy by far. Gingerly she shed her coat, making a peace offering of it. Her heart soared as she felt Louisa's fingers close on the material, tentative. Enough to make her press. "There is nothing but us." No God looking down on them, no Devil to damn them. Just this. 

But Louisa began to shake her head, her trembling of a different sort as she crushed the jacket to her chest. "No!" she cried again, and ran into the moonlight, stumbling along rooftops until she vanished over the lip of the horizon. 

Lestat felt panic rise in her chest, running after with all the considerable speed the blood of their King allowed. She found Louisa stumbling down the street, Lestat's jacket clasped around her shoulders--and knowing there was no danger that might threaten her darling, Lestat was struck by an urge to follow.

It might have been a decade ago, when she'd seen and loved and ruined that beautiful living girl stumbling these same streets. Seduced her, with lips and fingers and most of all  _ words _ by lamplight as that state of ‘living’ hung in the balance.

_ Beware your power over the dying, _ Maria had said back there on her island.

Louisa stumbled in a delirium of hunger down streets in the very lowest quarter, hair fallen from its pins and long legs exposed shamelessly--yet none approached. The stench of death hung thick in the air: old, sick death, vomit and shit and decay.

This was death as Louisa saw it at every turn, rotten and wasteful. It called to her, it seemed, whispering so intimately that when she vanished into the basement of a ramshackle tenement, even Lestat was caught by surprise.

And then she heard it. Soft at first. A little, reedy cry. And beneath that, growing stronger until even mortal ears couldn't have missed it, that heartbeat. Lestat was drawn near as surely as Louisa had been, needing to see what creature could make such a roar against so much death. 

The sight of them stole her breath: Louisa standing in the center of rotting furniture and decay with a bright, golden child clasped in her arms. Madonna and child reversed, blasphemed, as Louisa sucked at that still drumming heartbeat and swayed in the ecstasy of the kill. It was so beautiful, so encompassing of everything that Lestat had tried to give, that she couldn't suppress the delighted laugh that ripped through the stillness.

So it was to be this, then. Gentleness, purity. Aesthetic and pleasurable. She should have known that the peace and love she'd felt in a Paris church with a mother and child at her mercy would hold the key to Louisa's hurts better than savaging any number of fellow monsters, pure Louisa whose whole being had been violated by filth.

(Lestat could be filthy, she knew. Reveled in it, at times, and yet. Louisa wanted her, or had.)

But at the sound of Lestat’s joy, Louisa woke as from a trance, tore her head back violently enough to spill and waste a mouthful of the child's meager blood.

And still the strong heart beat.

"My martyr," Lestat chortled, high and girlish and half-mad, "Saint Louisa. Madonna of suffering, angel of death." She clasped her hand to her mouth, almost shaking with it--fear, relief. At last it would be over. At last the dark night of suffering would end. 

And yet Louisa looked at her as if Hell itself were beckoning, dropping the child and pushing past to once more vanish into the dark night. Lestat made to chase after her, to demand acceptance--and stopped. 

Still that child's heart was ringing in her ears. She turned slowly, mechanically, to look down on him. The little boy was filthy and fevered, and even so Lestat could see the beauty lurking beneath: how lustrous his hair would be, washed and combed; how bright his eyes, now bleary and clouded. This little child had given Louisa happiness, and for a moment Lestat was violently, viciously jealous--and then a better thought occurred.

The boy in her arms, against her breast (hidden, hidden beneath hastily buttoned waistcoat, not hidden  _ enough _ for her but invisible to any stupid mortal) breathed shallowly, tiny perfect fingers clinging, rosebud mouth open and bluish lids heavy over blue eyes. He could have been a twin to the boy Lestat vaguely remembered seeing in her mother's silvered mirror, before she understood. Before it broke.

With her hair tied back, the boy could have been this young man's son.

The child was dying as Louisa had been after Lestat's first eager touch, and would not last the day without tending. Lestat walked the streets as a mortal, though with speed no mortal could have achieved. She knew where the plague hospital was, had passed it by now and again, thinking of Louisa, before turning her attentions to more vicious prey. 

It was child's play to make them see what they wanted, to collapse on the doorstep mad with grief and beg, beg for them to save her beloved son, wanton and undone and pale as the dying often were. They saw the blood on her lips and shied from touching her, terrified. But she saw them take the child, wrap him in blankets and press a compress to his forehead as if it would do him any good. No doubt they'd bleed what precious life he had left, the fools. 

She hadn't much time. And Louisa had been so angry. And so hungry--she ate so little always, and Lestat had taken her to the edge. And the boy still lived; proof enough that even at her depth of need, Lestat's beauty hadn't properly indulged.

Dead animals--cats, rats, predator and prey indiscriminate--littered the street, and how Lestat-the-hunter ached at finding such a trail. She killed a woman, warm and comfortable, solely to sling her dress over an arm in preparation, shoving down the nausea of overindulgence all the while.

She'd drunk deep, so deep, from lovely Louisa's neck already.

And there in a gutter she found her beauty, as always.

"I've heard bathing in mud is fashionable these days," she remarked, stepping lightly through the sewage. "But I believe you've taken things too far."

Louisa looked at her with uncomprehending eyes, dull and drunk on despair. 

"Here now," Lestat crouched beside her, careful to hold the dress out of danger. "You can't accuse me of impropriety looking like that. You've already ruined my best coat." 

"What does it matter to you?" Louisa eyed the dress as if it were a coiled snake, her fingers clenched on the crushed, soiled velvet of the coat about her shoulders. 

Lestat took a chance in reaching out, covering Louisa's hands with her own. "The world is unbearable to you, isn't it," she whispered, baiting one small sliver of her own soul. "It seems as if the stars will fall and crush you with their emptiness."

The stars had fallen already, into those eyes--verdant and sparkling and incomprehensible always.

"We are monstrous." Louisa spoke haltingly to Lestat, timid as a mouse where she'd once held hundreds in her sway not legally but through force of beauty and brilliance and guttering flagging hope.

"No, not monstrous." Lestat stroked her cheek. "We are beautiful. As swift and terrible as angels, and as far apart from humans. You love them so, but you aren't one of them. You've ascended, my love." 

Louisa watched her face as if hypnotized, the soft whisper of her voice. She let Lestat pull her up, gently. 

"Shed no tears for them." Lestat held out the dress, terrified of her own hope. "Let me show you something. Please."

Louisa allowed Lestat to dress her like a handmaiden, bloodied chemise discarded in the muck like the sheets verifying a shattered maidenhead or a successful birth. The dress was not a perfect fit, but it would do, and Lestat would have others made that were more beautiful by far.

Skin rinsed clean by rain, hair carelessly knotted at her nape, Louisa accepted Lestat's kisses and submitted to being drawn along by the arm about her waist, willow-slim even lacking a corset.

Her hip was warm, her lovely head heavy on Lestat’s shoulder, as she led on and whispered in the upraised ear.

"There is no right, nor wrong, save what you and I feel, my beauty. And no pain you feel need endure forever."

Louisa drank the words in silence, nodding as if too drained to do more. It was more truly intimate than they'd been since the night Lestat had taken her life. 

She let go of her love only long enough to affect her own transformation, smoothing back her hair and straightening her clothes to create an air of self-possession (even then, even at that, Louisa looked as though she might drown). With the right nudge to cloud their eyes, the mortals she'd seen mere hours ago would never recognize her. 

As they neared the hospital Louisa seemed to wake, to resist the guiding tug of Lestat's arm ever so slightly. Lestat pulled her closer, determined not to have the moment spoiled. It wasn't a lie to spin the nurse a tale of her grieving wife; she made herself a stately gentleman only looking to bring his dearest comfort--a little heart to nurture, you see, to give her purpose--and the nurse was all but in tears as Lestat pressed coins into her hand and wrapped her prize in a blanket, looking up long enough to see dawning horror on Louisa's face. 

She didn't recapture Louisa's arm as she passed, walking past slowly only to break into a run once the mortals were out of sight. She had to get there first. It had to be perfect.

The boy slept the sleep before death, skin clammy and pale but washed clean by the nuns. Still his little heart beat, though erratically, like the ticking of a watch in need of winding.

Lestat's little golden watch, safe in her pocket, he'd be.

Louisa moved slowly, and so there was time to carry him in, through the wrecked parlor with its cracked plaster (prints of their fists interrupted the orderly print on cadet blue paper). She tucked him into their little-used bed, arranged him and quickly set herself to rights, again the beautiful terrible self-possessed master she had to be. And all the while that heart rang in her ears.

By the time their beauty returned, Lestat and the boy were a portrait, curled together 'neath the embroidered coverlet which had occupied so many of Louisa's evenings.

"Louisa," she greeted when her love entered; soft, as if she might wake the dying child. "Welcome home."

"What have you done?"

"Nothing." The 'yet' hung unsaid. "I've realized something, beloved." She basked in the rapt attention of her audience, the way Louisa flinched when she stroked the side of the boy's face. 

"Lestat, please. Don't-"

"I haven't been all you need," she continued, unabated. "And...I stole something from you when I made you. I've been thinking of how to give it back."

Thinking; let Louisa imagine it had been for more than minutes. She enjoyed gestures, the idea of planned solicitude, and Lestat would happily indulge.

"You took nothing," Louisa said, chewing her lip to bleeding with the outright contradiction, poor lamb. "It was I who--by God, Lestat, he looks so like."

The thing Lestat had caused to spill forth in a rush of pain and blood had been not yet living. No heart had beat, not like the one in this small chest, and if there were a babe in that writhing mess strewn upon the ground of the swamp, surely she had not seen it. And yet Louisa's lily-pale hand skated reverently over yellow locks and pale, chubby cheeks, accompanied by a whisper.

"Poor boy, poor boy--" red lips on pale face, so close to those small unhealed punctures.

That was all the permission she needed (none at all, but the enticement of that wondering face). She gathered the boy up in her arms, limbs awkward and akimbo. But only one of them was to be the mother, after all.

"What--" Louisa watched first with confusion and then shock as Lestat bit her wrist, trying to come between them until Lestat bared her teeth in a terrible, bloody snarl. Louisa was an audience, not an actress. The stage was all wrong for her.

Lestat dribbled the first drops across the boy's lips. Her fourth child, small and pristine. A gift. She saw that small, pointed tongue flick out, brush the jagged edges of her wounded skin, and then clamp down. 

It was an unexpected fire, the draw on her veins as insistent as that heartbeat. She heard it and felt her own rise in tandem, beating almost in fear of the implacable life force now tied to her own.

She may have cried out--must have, the pain so terrible, the bleeding suck always a reminder of when she lay beneath Magnus' implacable weight and felt herself begin to die.

This, though, would not kill. It would save not only the boy, but so much besides--for already Louisa drew closer, pressed her lips to Lestat's temple and held them both in the circle of her soft, delicate arms. She wiped away the tears of pain and relief that came, and all the while that heartbeat raged until--

She practically threw the boy at his new mother, wrenching back to nurse the tear in her wrist which stained lace cuffs and enticed both her companions so. The boy snapped, snarled, all instinct.

"No!" she snarled back. "Not from me. Never--never again from me."

It was intolerably slow in healing, still closing as she called a servant and showed their newest how to feed. Already the boy was watching her with his large, uncanny eyes, instinctively turned to nestle against Louisa's breast even though he was too old to nurse. A small, rank part of her felt hate for him then, a sense of loss even as she was sure this would keep Louisa near. 

"Where is my mother?" he asked Louisa, his small hands fisting in the bodice of her dress. 

"She's holding you now," Lestat told him, setting the lines clear and simple. "You're our child now, you understand? Louisa is your mother." 

"You're my father, then?" Already he was quick, following on ideas with dogged ease. 

She was no mother, but no father either. Fathers beat and used you, abandoned you if you were lucky. They sat boorish and stupid and demanded fealty they hadn't earned. "...You may call me Lestat."

Louisa was watching her too now, looking for a chink in the armor from which she might wrest her precious answers (as if they'd give any satisfaction, even if they existed).

"By God, Lestat." She'd thought Louisa would have eyes only for the boy now, and yes, she did appear enraptured, tracing his face and ears, counting fingers and toes and learning him by touch as much as vision. But then that emerald gaze rose to encompass Lestat as well, wondering and seemingly starved for the sight of her. "By God, what have you done? This is--"

"What have  _ we _ done, my love." The tenderness and wonder in Louisa’s eyes burned, itched. It made Lestat feel exposed once more. "I think perhaps it's best our little Claude sleep in your bed tonight, don't you?"

As she stole a kiss, she whispered, "After all, some beasts are known to eat their own young."

She went away securely the monster, escaped the apartments to accost the first pickpocket who crossed her path. She made a mess of him, dumping the gibleted remains in the river. Her body still felt strung tight by the turning, alive with energy she didn't understand and a prowling violence she feared she would turn on Louisa. Empty threats, that's all they should be, and she kept herself away until she was sure that was the extent of it. 

Louisa had gone to bed as she'd been told, cradling the dead child to her chest. They were a sight, And Lestat found herself watching even as the skies lightened, even as it was a danger to do so. The sunlight was a petty threat compared to what she had let in that night.


	3. The Mousetrap

Claude made them at last a matched set--his hair the same lustrous gold as Lestat's wild and tied-back mane, his constant place at Louisa's side leaving no doubt as to whom he adored. Patrons at the opera who thought them familiar, distant and untouchable, would smile blank smiles at his small face and titter about apron strings while he hid his face ever so charmingly in Louisa’s skirts. He spoke only rarely, ghosting about their lavish apartments in short pants and socks and watching, always watching as Louisa brushed out her hair or the rarely-seen servants went through the motions of pressing and hanging Lestat's elaborate clothes. As the years passed, he seemed to undergo an opposite growth to most children: he became Louisa's shadow, clamoring into her lap the moment she settled in to read and holding tight to her fingers whenever he walked beside her. 

Once, he gathered up Louisa's delicate hand to greet her good evening and kissed it, affecting a little bow, and she had smiled at the charming bit of mimicry.

He was so very beautiful, and so like the boy she'd killed. Once, he said (as children do, as she'd said to Babette) that he'd marry her when he was 'all grown up.’

Lestat had met her uneasy eyes, laughed and cuffed him playfully, and said "The boy certainly has taste, my dear!"

Lestat kissed her hard that night, on top of her coffin after Claude had already drifted off. It felt scandalous. It felt--she'd moaned, secure in the knowledge that the world would end before their dead child woke outside his time.

They were happy, was the core of it. Dangerously so, for Louisa knew contentment only meant that misery lurked nearby, yet unacknowledged. But every time Lestat's hand found hers in the dark of their private box and Claude listened to her read first Aesop, then Aristotle, she allowed herself the indulgence of hope. And it strengthened her, the nights when she knew Lestat was away courting some poor enamored soul to a cruel death (though she no longer brought them to their home). Claude was with her on such nights, lying on the carpet with his tin soldiers and watching her. 

"Don't worry, Louisa," he said as he came to her, pressing his cheek to her hand. "I won't let anyone hurt you." 

And so he took his words as a pledge, making sour glares at the men who chatted with them at balls and drawing hearty laughter from the crowds.

It was endearing, yes. Sweet, how when he grew drowsy he would hold out his arms in a wordless plea to be lifted and carried upon her hip, head heavy on her shoulder and breath cold at her throat.

They began sending him out to tutors after a few years, stolid men of mature years and more formal schooling than either Louisa or (so the old man's raving had hinted) Lestat had ever managed. Men who could, perhaps, make him just a bit less a maman's boy. A bit more independent.

(If those lessons afforded them time alone, also... It didn't make the rest any less true.)

Lestat had grown bold in those years, demanding to see Louisa undressed though she rarely returned the favor. Louisa still remembered the night Claude had been made, and the surprising, alluring softness of Lestat's unbound breasts. She had been a magnificent, wild thing, more beautiful than Louisa had ever seen her in that moment; but she had dared to say such things only once. The wonder of it wasn't worth the virulent rage (they had lost a fine dressing table that night, the wood splintered and glass shattered on the floor). 

So she had told herself for years, and this night too as she folded the crinkling layers of vermilion (it was her own private game, to court the limits of Lestat's impatience; to see if she would wait through the ceremony or pounce in a fit of petty want).  

"Claude told me he wishes to marry me," she confided as she worked, thinking it might become a joke between them. 

But Lestat's face soured. "He's getting too old for that nonsense." She didn't touch, though her eyes were watching the hollow of Louisa's hip as she slid down her slip.

Clothing was becoming so dashed complex, more so than when they met. Whalebone, hoops, panniers and layers and so heaped upon the body that Louisa was sure she'd boil every night, were she living.

"He's just a boy, Lestat," she said without meeting her eyes, bending at the waist to remove a slipper and knowing what the corset did to her shape in that position.

"Is he? Nothing more? Not your particular darling?" Lestat's voice carried a silky venom, a promise of cruelty, and dead or no Louisa wondered what was being exposed by her split drawers.

"You've fallen far if you fear the competition of a mere child's affections." She kept her voice light, part of her unnerved at the heated tingling of nerves that came from daring Lestat's anger. 

"Watch what you say." Lestat was on her in an instant, molded against her back, lips against her ear. "The world is cruel to faithless women." 

"And yet here you stand." She surprised even herself with her jealousy at the warm intimacy and uncomplicated adoration Lestat showed those she killed. She paid for it, jerked up and whirled around to look her mercurial lover in the face. 

"Let us go down to the streets, then." Still in her breeches, still shielded beneath coat and vest and shirtsleeves (and what lay beneath even that), Lestat grasped the top of Louisa's corset and tore it with ease. "Let's see which of us they think a woman."

"And of course it's what they think that counts, isn't it?" Louisa said. She'd long grown accustomed to being seen in all manner of undress, and felt a hot spike of triumph both at causing that loss of composure and at the way Lestat's grey eyes stared, devouring her hips, her throat, the nipples preserved forever hard and tender as in the most perfect pleasure. (She wondered whether Lestat's were the same.) "But of course, they don't know that I'm the one who will pay to replace that. Perhaps I should take it out of your pin money."

Lestat's canines showed their full length as she shoved Louisa onto the bed, retreating to physicality in the face of her hated dependence. "I am the master here." And yet she stiffened with something like fear when Louisa sat up, watching with a steady gaze. 

"Of course. The master of us all, hiding in your finery. Frightened of nothing so much as your slave." That had been an ugly night, and an ugly fight, and she saw it pierce. 

"I fear nothing." Lestat shed her jacket in a rage, balling it up in her hands and hurling it into the corner. The vest followed, and with some hesitation the shirt after that. But no more. "The difference between us is still plain," she boasted, as if she'd won anything at all.

"Is it truly?" Louisa murmured,  drawing a leg up and toying with her garter, drawing down the fine stocking in a slow hiss of silk. "I wouldn't know, I'm sure."

Lestat saw her always, saw and touched, slapped and bit and drank her down to drowsy lassitude, but she'd never seen much of Lestat. Never been permitted to touch or explore, or to find out whether it was true what they said about tribads in words not meant for the likes of Louisa's ears.

Lestat's hand grasped her ankle, thumb playing in the hairs and nail brushing over the skin without pressure.

"You know so little, ma petite savant." Lestat raised the delicate bones to her lips, stretching Louisa's leg long and elegant and forcing her to arch back. "All these books in your little schoolroom, and yet the world would devour you." 

As though she hadn't given all that right to the tempestuous goddess before her. "You would protect me by telling me no more than those monsters?" 

Without warning Louisa was flat on her back, leverage stolen as Lestat hooked Louisa's legs over her shoulders, for nothing other than the vulgar look of it. "It would pain you to know them. Why should I tell you?" 

Louisa turned her head to the side, demure. Answering would only lead her to an old trap, and she wasn't yet ready to let go of the sight before her. 

"No, no, no," Lestat leaned over her, forcing her to bend or be broken, her hips rising off the bed. "When a student is asked a question, they're meant to answer," And she brought her hand down, sharp, across Louisa's breast, leaving a pink imprint behind. "Or be punished."

"Ah!" As though she  _ knew-- _ as though Louisa hadn't heard the old man ramble of a denied convent school and demand to know where his daughter learned her letters.

She bit her lip appealingly, ran a hand over that blood-warm spot. Pretending indifference sometimes brought Lestat to a heated passion, but in this state was just as likely to send her off into the night in search of someone to properly "appreciate" her.

"Tell me because I wish it," Louisa tried. "Because you wish to please me, see me smile."

"Little minx." A hand at the small of Louisa's back held her suspended as the other roamed the length of her leg.

Her own hands she fisted above her head, so as not to do the forbidden.

"What I know would bring no smiles to that sweet face.”

"You're too cruel." She fixed Lestat with her full gaze, swathed in long lowered lashes. "To hold what I wish to know so close and deny it." 

Nails bit at her knee, her thigh. There would be blood on the sheets. "I've told you you've no need of it. Stupid--"

"Not that."

That, at last, caught Lestat's curiosity. Such a simple change. "Oh?"

"It's you." She put her finger across her lips. "You hold yourself so close, and yet I never..." she bit down, rousing the slightest scent of blood. 

"Is that all?" Lestat laughed, indulgent. Unbelieving. "So little as that would content you?" She sat back, legs folded beneath her. "Come here, then. Let's see if you truly have the nerve." 

Somewhere Lestat had convinced herself that Louisa was a proper lady, shocked and scandalized by childish acts of bravado. It gave her advantage, now and then, as she crawled slowly forward. As she cupped Lestat's face and kissed her soundly, feeling demanding hands grip her for balance against a mere meeting of lips.

Louisa had developed the illusion of caution since becoming a vampire, though in truth she felt she had never escaped the reckless need of those weeks that had brought Lestat to her. Her fingers mapped pale shoulders taut with lean muscle and spattered with old, small, eternal scars. She was at once tempted to devour everything and to simply to wrap her arms around the elusive devil in her grasp.  _ Let he who holds the Devil hold him well - he will not be caught a second time. _

But there was an inevitability to her touch, even as she delayed it by kissing the crook of an elbow, dragged her teeth along an earlobe to the reward of an exquisite shiver. When her hands brushed across those familiar bandages they both froze, Louisa flicking her eyes up like the prey she so often was.

Lestat was staring down at her, eyes wide and dangerous, but she didn't move. She didn't slap Louisa's hands away, and no curse fell from her lips. Gently, Louisa squeezed through the cloth, feeling the soft tissue there. No word. Her hand fell into the rhythm of a massage, feeling the strange give in their pale marble flesh. stopping to look for danger after every movement. Lestat's lip was caught between her teeth, pink splashed across her cheeks. She was staring at Louisa, angry. But whether at the touch or the cessation of it, even she didn't seem to know.

"You are terrible, mon ange," she whispered, drawing close to that broad mouth. "You are beautiful and overwhelming, would you but allow--"

"Allow what, my dear?" A hand intercepted hers as it ventured down, towards the waist of black trousers. "Again you reveal yourself, by expecting to be allowed, rather than needing to demand."

Somewhere, Louisa raged, even as she flexed her wrist and heaved against whatever Lestat was to her.

Somewhere, she was sure, this would not need to be a battle.

There was no raging at Lestat any more than at a wall (Jericho was only a bedtime story in the end, and Paul had not only used his voice). To do so was to court her own disaster -- violence or, worse, abandonment. 

"Is not kindness the luxury of the strong?" Her fingers traced small circles where they could reach. "Are you afraid of someone such as me?"

Lestat's grip tightened, squeezed. "You think me incapable of mastering you?"

She let herself cringe visibly, just that little bit. "I'm saying you have nothing to fear from me." 

She closed her free hand around the one that held her, gently pulling it away. Eyes on Lestat and not her hands, her own terrifying daring, she reached around to the catch of Lestat's bandages and severed the knot, slowly pulling the tattered end of the cloth loose. No sudden movements. No words. And Lestat only watched her, every muscle a vibrating scream of tension. 

Louisa went around and around, movement slow and easily stopped, until a coil of cloth had pooled on the bed. 

Lestat's skin was red and marked, the punishment of it too plain for long seconds before their unearthly blood did its work. 

"Oh." Louisa gave herself the luxury of sight, a half remembered image from decades ago. "Oh, my dearest." She pressed her lips to falsely warm skin as she had then, just over the heart. Lestat's nipples were small and pink, bright contrasts to Louisa's broad darkness. Perfect roses to fit between her lips, and the cry it wrenched from Lestat a surprise to both of them. 

The door creaked.

It was Lestat who wrenched free, Lestat who struck out and  defended at once. Louisa was sprawled on the far side of the bed, mouth bleeding, by the time the door opened. Lestat had arms clamped about her chest, trying to cover all Louisa had just been courting.

And there in the doorway stood their boy.

"Louisa?" He sounded first uncertain, then alarmed at the sight of blood (what foolishness, when it was the very spark that animated them). He started into the room, meaning to rush to her. 

"I'm fine," she assured him, desperate to keep him at bay. Out of the range of Lestat's heaving breaths laden not with passion but something strange and unknown, her grey eyes shrunk to pinpricks in her head. 

"But--"

"It's fine. Please. I'll be with you soon, dearest." As she said the word, she felt some unspoken shift in the room. Claude wasn't looking at her, she realized. From the moment she'd spoken, confirmed she could move, his eyes had locked to Lestat, expression inscrutable. 

"Both of you get out," Lestat growled, almost too low even for their preternatural hearing. 

She was still almost naked, her remaining stocking coming free and falling down her leg. "Please, Lestat, he didn't mea --" 

"GET OUT!" There was a mighty crash as Lestat gripped a vase of roses from beside the bed and shattered it against the far wall. Louisa all but fled, grabbing a dressing gown to hide herself before her strange, too-knowing child. She pressed her hand to her mouth and leaned against the closed door, trembling. 

"Louisa..."

When had that happened? When had he stopped calling her Maman? His hand went to her mouth, wiped away the blood that should have been Lestat's, carried it up to his rosebud mouth and she barely stopped herself from striking out to stop him licking.

_ Tasting her. _

His golden lashes fluttered on his cheeks before he refocused.

"Louisa, Lestat...Hurt you?"

He grasped the gown's lapel. His bloodied mouth was so near.

"No, no, son."  _ Son. _ Let that remind him; pacify him. Let it-- "Lestat and I--"

"She's not like me, is she?" he asked.

"Non, dear." There were so many ways around that question. So many. "Lestat is--" She had sworn never to hide things from her dear child, her little love, the way Lestat hid things from her. But how did one quantify all that their maker was? "Please, Claude. Leave it be. You'll make her angry." 

Claude nodded, as if that were a satisfactory end to it. He avoided Lestat except when they killed together, their private communion  in which she had no part. He seemed to prefer curling up on Louisa's lap and begging her to read, one hand fidgeting with the collar of a sailor suit. 

 

It was when Lestat dragged them out to the opera, complaining loudly that they were terrible bores, that it bubbled over. They had made a habit of mingling during the lengthy intermissions, just enough to cultivate an air of mystery that afforded its own kind of privacy. The handsome couple, Lestat in her fine suits and Louisa in the latest fashion (at Claude and Lestat's insistence), with their lovely son at their side. 

Claude was almost always silent on these occasions, the model of perfect behavior. But this night he fussed and fidgeted, at last crying out "Maman!" 

Louisa turned her head to console him, only to find him gone from her side. Instead he was pulling at the hem of Lestat's coat, eyes pleading. "Maman, pick me up!"

The crowd laughed, of course, patting the child on his curls and making much of his sweet 'mistake.' Teased his father for being so good-looking, pretty as a girl.

Only Louisa saw the panic and fury in Lestat's eyes as she laughed louder than all the rest. Only she noticed Claude’s slyness turn to bitterness at a cruel jab gone awry and resulting in mockery rather than triumph.

And it wasn't fair, that anger and defensiveness Lestat felt. She hadn't been so wedded to it, once--her status, her power, her manhood.

Louisa still remembered the magnificent, scandalous woman she'd taken on as her 'companion,’ after her 'illness.' Still in breeches and hose, still fierce and cruel and beautiful, but not so--

Frightened.

Lestat, master of them all, was frightened.

 

"I'll kill him!" Lestat was apoplectic behind their safely locked doors, and it fell to Louisa to do what she must. Claude couldn't defend himself. He needed her. He allowed himself to need her in a way Lestat couldn't. Wouldn't.  

"He's only a child. He didn't know-"

"He knew. Get out of my way, Louisa! Or I'll make an example of you too." Lestat was shaking still, fist clenching and unclenching as her eyes burned into the figure hiding behind their elaborate furniture. 

"They know nothing. There is no threat to us." They squared like prize fighters in the small sitting room, Louisa's body her only shield. "I'll speak with him." In desperation, she caught Lestat's arm, "The luxury of the strong, Lestat.  _ Please _ ." 

They froze that way for a long moment, and Louisa feared they would turn to blows. Then a deeper shudder passed through Lestat, and she acquiesced. "Take care that you don't leave the shadow of your protector, little one," she addressed their hidden third, and stalked out.

Louisa closed her eyes and let out a slow breath before turning to face her cowering son.

But he wasn't. With Lestat gone, he stood straight and tall, gaze sharp and glittering and reptilian in his small round face. His little bow mouth drew up, pursed, and he took her hand and drew her down to her knees with a grasp too practiced.

"What sort of example did she mean, Louisa?" he asked, one hand touching her bare shoulder as her skirts and petticoats pooled about them. "It's a poor thing to threaten a woman."

His warm hand traveled, skimming along to the curve where neck and body met, and then hesitated. He was so like, so familiar, and she forced herself not to jerk away when the touch went not to her breast but her throat.

He was her son. Her child.

He was  _ nor _ Paul.

"If it's so poor," she began, not licking her lips. Not swallowing or breathing or projecting an image of discomfort, "Then why did you create that scene? Why hurt Lestat so?"

"Then she  _ is _ a woman?" he smirked. "When it protects her preciousness?"

"Lestat's manners are a benefit to us all," she reminded him. "We mightn't move so freely without a chaperone." 

His face contorted, for a moment unspeakably ugly. "They should laugh even harder at an infant than a vulgar fake, I suppose." He had Lestat's talent for sweet poison, calm words hiding knives. 

"Claude," she began, meaning to rebuke him.

"It should be my duty. If  _ she _ hadn't made me as I am." His hand moved up to cup her cheek, to draw their faces close. "I should be the one to protect you, my dear Louisa." 

Guilt held her still, the remembrance of Claude's face as he had at last wrested that last ugly secret from her lips.

"We are all made as we are, darling. There is no choice to it." She held his small shoulders in her hands, smelling his victim's cologne--musky and adult. "Be grateful. I am, for you would be long buried, elsewise."

"But there is choice, Louisa," he whispered as though imparting some secret, as though instructing the naive. "Her choice. You think it chance that you are so made, beautiful and weak and gentle, perfect to madden men's souls? If you could but feel it, the desire that ripples through a crowd when you enter a room..." his eyes were all she could see, somewhere distant, and there was a sound in her head like the ticking of a clock.

"Succulent," he said softly, thumb on her lip. "Were I made properly..."

They'd kissed before. Often. He was her son, his childish pecks were a joy, but this.

She shuddered, and he laughed, superior, held her face still with little cat's claws while a fang slipped (just slipped, just accidental) and cut her lip.

She knew she would do anything for him, as certain in her bones as everything else was unsteady. She had killed for him many times, and taken his side against Lestat's rages. But this.

Their lips were both rouged with her blood; one of his small hands curling around ringlets of her dark hair, tying them even more intractably together; she heard something like a moan, a child's approximation of what an adult should sound like, and jerked back as hard as she could. Her hair stayed with Claude, curling around his hand and down his small arm. He looked at her with eyes that were not a child's.

"What do you think I am, Louisa?" He ran his tongue along his bottom lip. "Frozen in time, like one of Grimm’s unfortunates?"

"You are my  _ son," _ she gasped; truth like bedrock, linchpin of their beautiful terrible family.

"Your lover, Louisa. A man in mind--more man than  _ she _ is, I'll wager, and you are the one who taught me that the mind is what matters." Yet his eyes fixed on her body, the body he'd seen so exposed and aroused and needful of Lestat.

"You can't-- _ we _ can't" She fumbled to explain, evade. "You are. Too small. The thing you ask requires blood, more than your body could spare." And would require, too, that Louisa fasten her teeth again upon that tiny throat, feel again the despair and revulsion and bottomless hunger she had when she killed some nameless mortal boy and Lestat gifted her this.

His lip curled. "So I am ill-made indeed. Unmanned by her, a little eunuch to pose no threat to your virtue."

"She made you to--" to what? To keep Louisa at her side, when they had been orbiting ever further from each other. To show that she could, to find some new depth of depravity yet unmined. To quench her own loneliness in their long silences. "--to save you," she finished quietly. "I've told you that time and again."

"You told me a fairytale when I was a child, meant to placate me. How much older must I be to learn the truth? When my hair would be thin and grey? When I am a moldering corpse?"

"That will never happen to you." Even now, she couldn't bear the loss of him. "Don't say such things."

"You would have me pretend, as she does. To let you dress me as a plaything and play as though I understand nothing. I can no more be a child than Lestat can be a man." His eyes narrowed, decisive. "And I will prove it to her."


	4. Fennel, Columbine, and Rue

Claude was entering what other families--normal families--might call a difficult period. Lestat called it being a damned nuisance. The boy slipped her more often than not when they went out together only to appear with nary a hair out of place at the end of the night, his cheeks bright with blossoming roses. At home he displayed no change, quiet and rapt on the throne he'd made of Louisa's lap, the pair of them pouring over some dusty volume of forgotten lore (oh yes, she knew, even if she learned it better spoken). 

She'd tried bringing it up to Louisa once, and earned only a cold look in return. 

"He's only a child. You should keep better watch over him." Louisa adored her impromptu crowning as mother, proving to be one of the only correct hunches Lestat had ever had in regards to her raven-haired beauty. 

She had to come all the way home alone, Claude nowhere in sight, before she could be taken seriously.

"Do you  _ see _ , Louisa?" Lestat said, gesturing to the empty space by her side where their son belonged.

Louisa's lips parted in a gasp, and her embroidery fell to the floor as one hand pressed her own, more private emptiness. Lestat averted her eyes from the sight.

The slap came utterly unexpected, small needle-pricked fingertips rough on Lestat's cheek. It was child's play to catch Louisa's flailing fists and hold her at bay through struggles that only bruised her.

"What have you done, Lestat? Where did you leave our  _ son _ ?"

Much as Lestat wanted to strike back and box Louisa's ears for the unfairness of it all, she mastered her temper as she could never properly master her family.

"That is what I've been trying to  _ tell _ you! I don't know--he runs off when I take him. Louisa. Louisa, it's not  _ safe _ for him!" And slowly, Lestat's own fear seemed to penetrate the panic and rage that had taken away her woman's sense.

"What do you mean he...he's frightened of being alone. He wouldn't have gone!" 

Lestat wondered at the simplicity of her clever bookkeeper, her storied librarian, failing to see through their boy's duplicity. It was true that Claude would rarely be coaxed from Louisa's shadow when they were about the apartments, silent and staring with one hand fisted in her skirt. It had been all he was, once.

But Lestat had seen something spring up underneath, a sharp calculation hidden under blank eyes that peered out from under soft golden locks. 

"I'm telling you he did! Have you lost your sense?" She shook her captive just hard enough to quiet her. "Womanly fretting will get us nowhere. You have to speak sense to him." 

Louisa was staring at her, suddenly still as the ocean before a hurricane. "He's dead, isn't he." 

"What?" she balked. 

"I perpetrated some ill I haven't realized, and you made good on your threat. I thought you'd at last come to have some fondness for him in your shriveled heart, but you..."

Her eyes were dry as she said it, dry and ancient as if she were eight hundred rather than eighty. There was something of the mad elders in her at that moment, a well of feeling so deep as to be nearly beyond humanlike expression. Beyond sanity. And when Lestat snatched her close, she came, unresisting.

_ They grew gentle at the end; loved too much. Until they couldn't feed, couldn't survive, went into the fires laughing-- _

Lestat's 'shriveled' heart beat double-fast now, fear for both her caged songbirds choking her. "He's alive," she hissed with determination to make it so. "I wouldn't play that card on some paltry imagined ill, nor leave you wondering and hoping, my precious one."

She knew her Louisa; if sincerity would not convince her, monstrosity would.

"Swear."

"I swear, damn it all to Hell, and now you must help to keep him that way!"

Their difficult, pretty little boy, such a match for Lestat. Undeniably her son, the reason Louisa had finally donned the engraved gold band on her left hand and wore it night after night.

(Musn't have a scandal, even if Louisa had refused to involve the Church.)

"What should we do?" Willing to be joined with her at last, so long as it was for Claude. 

"If there are two of us it'll be easier to comb the city." Start small, simple. "There's no threat that can touch us while we search for him."

The grim determination in Louisa's face was made for odes, sonnets for those firm lips and that set brow. Lestat settled for pacing the entryway as Louisa went through the nuisances of becoming presentable to polite society. She was tying her hair back when the door clicked. 

Lestat was at her side in an instant, hand on her arm. "Don't give a sign that anything is amiss," she hissed. "You were coming out on a walk with me, you understand?" 

"But--" 

"Do as I say!" Claude would be far easier to pin if he were unaware, at least a little longer. "Finish with those damnable clothes." Ridiculous. Only valuable in how tantalizing they were to remove. If Louisa were only to dress like her, they could've avoided all this.

Miracle of miracles, she did, gone biddable in the way that most infuriated Lestat. Where was  _ her _ woman, the furious one she could almost touch when they lay together (Lestat on top, always on top--she hated to be weighted down upon beds) and Lestat did again what she'd done in the filth of the waterfront, back when Louisa had called her Angel. Where was she now?

Hidden under this placid pool, this looking-glass whose shattering would mean so much more than seven years' misfortune.

With the skill of an ingenue, Lestat smoothed over her anger with an ingratiating, even romantic expression and kissed Louisa's right wrist above the lace edging of her glove.

"You say that now," she continued as one partway through a scene, "But you'll soon see. It's a lovely place with such lights and glass for you to look upon, and mortals--you're too often alone in here."

The door's well-oiled hinges couldn't conceal its movement from vampire ears, nor its sudden halt at Lestat's words.

"As you wish," Louisa returned in a near whisper, her lines stilted as any amateur. "We can go now." 

Lestat flung open the door with a grand flourish, ready to pretend surprise--but there was no one there but an empty hallway. Claude was curled up in  _ their _ chair as they passed the sitting room, both sides daring the other to call the bluff. 

And when they were out under the stars, Louisa tensed again. "How long are we to wait? Won't he grow suspicious?"

"We might take our fictitious walk," Lestat dared. "Heavens forfend you walk further than a stone's throw from this house without being dragged." And she took Louisa's arm in her's, too rough but not rejected. 

Louisa fell into step, still glancing back at the Rue Royale as it shrank behind them. "What will we do?"

"Toss him in the river and have done," Lestat snapped, regret following straight on its heels. "He's a vampire, Louisa. You needn't play the mother hen so dutifully."

"Is that not why you made him?" she asked smoothly, eyes glittering in the darkness. "For me to mother and fuss? One cannot simply put a child aside like a toy or a woman when one does not want him, Lestat."

_ The Hell one can't! _ The words stayed clamped behind Lestat's teeth. Bad enough Louisa had met the shade of her father, addled, blind, and ailing; the memory and person of Gabrielle (mother, lover, twin, child) were not to be shared or spoken of. Too dear a secret loss.

"He wants other occupation," she said instead, staring down and listening to the ringing of her walking stick's silvered ferrule on the pavement. "He's not so young as he used to be, Louisa, nor so innocent."

"I know." A hint of darkness in Louisa's tone caused Lestat to glance over at her, and then she was caught as she so often was. As she had been from the very beginning, seeing that flawless form bleached by moonlight and death.

"Well," what else was there to say? If she asked and Louisa refused to tell, or lied? "Then you'll know he needs a stronger male influence in his life."

"More than you?" Mild. Even. Poisonous.

The barb stuck deep, and for a moment she felt like a ridiculous peacock, a nervous little bird garbed in bright and insubstantial layers. No.  _ No _ . 

"I haven't the patience. Or have you forgotten?" Her lip curled back from a fang just so, and she hated the enjoyment she took in watching Louisa shrink into herself. 

"But he already has his tutors," she tried instead. 

Never gone long enough, never a moment of real quiet between them by the time they broke through the ice and mistrust. They might go on like this for an eternity, nearly touching but never touched.

Real children grew, changed, and moved away. Their Claude had been the same for decades, and would for a thousand years. (Fancy that, the three of them as old and wise as Maria, settled at last into some manner of peace. Louisa's reticence at last worn away completely, her heart laid open to Lestat.)

"Perhaps tutors are not the thing. I could show him men of another sort."

"He already knows killers, Lestat." The protest was weary.

"Honestly, Louisa, I realize you think me less than practical at times, but then I wonder whether you think at all." The cutting words were not just for Louisa, but every lover who'd ever looked down on poor simple Lestat, with her fool head in the clouds. Louisa was the only one present, though, the sole target, and she stiffened with the hit. "We pay a club membership for a reason, do we not?"

_ I pay _ ; Lestat could almost  _ see _ the words sealed mutinously inside Louisa's pretty head. Grasping, bourgeois, her control of purse strings, but it gave her something to do on her long nights alone.

"You so rarely use it," her well-bred lady said instead. "I'd rather begun to think they had too few whores for your tastes."

"If it was whores I wanted, I would have no need of their help." And she pulled Louisa ever so slightly closer, the night they'd met unspoken but remembered. 

"I'm not sure that would improve his character," she kept on, fighting for no reason but to have done it. 

"Do you even know what goes on inside? Have you looked up from your samplers while I wasn't looking?" Lestat hated those needlepoints, the perversion of household domesticity that she had never really wanted. Just wild extravagance and this woman at her side. 

"Why do you ask, except to belittle me?"

"Never, my  _ lady _ . I'm making an invitation. After so long an absence, the famed Lestat de Lioncourt might easily make an introduction of his fine new associate. You can see for yourself if the character suits your precious darling."

"You'd dress me up as a meal for your man friends. Take me there to be used, and then what--'rescue' me by dining on them yourself?"

Louisa always thought the worst, and perhaps the most exciting. For when she spoke it aloud, Lestat could envision the melodrama; Louisa in a cheap dress, cut too low above and hiked too high below, swooning on Lestat's arm for all the room to see and want. Showing just what sort of woman a man like Lestat could buy, the rarest emerald. And when Lestat walked away, when the room turned--and it would--

Oh, the bloodbath they could have. The passion they could share, coupling on sheets soaked in the blood of evildoers.

But no. Not that game for sweet, proper Louisa.

"I rather thought you'd join me  _ as _ a 'man friend', my imaginative little mistress." Propriety didn't stop Lestat taking advantage of a pocket of shadows to...well, take advantage, shoving her woman against a wall by the stiff-boned waist. The kisses to that white throat were half-seduction, half-dare; let her scream and involve mortals. Come what may, Lestat would have satisfaction for the hunger churning since her earlier hunt was frustrated by Claude's escape.

In moments like this she would imagine their first encounter, mortal Louisa rapturous beneath her touch and the pair of them connected body and soul. 

"Lestat," that voice, perfectly made for half-gasped syllables in that low, round alto. "Please."

It was sweet to hear her plead, maddening in a way the poor thing didn't understand (or maybe knew too well). Lestat grew bolder, hemming her prize in and relishing those small gasps of uncertainty.

"Please," Louisa tried again. "Stop, someone," distracted even from her own thoughts, from anything besides Lestat's touch, "We'll be seen." 

"Then it will be the last thing they see." What a fine vision to offer, too good for sending cutthroats to Hell or the bottom of the river. 

She was struggling now, realizing there was nowhere to go. 

"What will you do, my darling?" Lestat smiled, playing indulgence that was not for an instant on offer.

Louisa's small strength (far greater than a team of humans, but far, far less than Lestat's) held static for a moment, considering. Weighing. Animal cunning glinted in her eyes, and then she melted.

Moments like this, when she opened like a flower (near-)willingly, Lestat thought there could be nothing better. And in reward she played fair; didn't tear the clothing or pull down more than a few ringlets of the hair. Nothing shameful or humiliating. She just hitched a long leg up to her hip and began a pantomime of rutting, putting hands and mouth to use elsewhere skin was exposed.

She'd lived a memory of this many times over; the young fool from the night they met hadn't properly appreciated the wonder of it as he'd been lucky enough to fuck up into that sweet, wet, living softness that dwelled beneath tight stockings and voluminous petticoats. She'd ingrained every detail into her mind, the tight slide, the stretch and sweat, and she played through them now.

"That's right, my girl."

"Lestat--"

"Hush. Don't fight it." And Louisa didn't, when the fangs entered her neck.

There was nothing so magnificent as the kill, feeling Louisa go weak and pliant as they became one heartbeat, one creature connected by life itself. Louisa was darkness and rainfall and the secrets of the volumes Lestat hadn't learned to read until she was dead. A hundred, a hundred's hundred times she could have that feast and never tire of it, til the ending of the world. 

Louisa had to lean on her when it was done, the pair of them cuddled together in the wee hours of dawn as if they were some pair of smitten lovers, all unrest hidden. 

Claude's eyes were locked on the door as they came up the step--she knew it in the seconds before he looked away, and felt a flare of triumph. Louisa would make a fine companion. She'd win again in no time.

 

*~*

 

A few nights later, with Claude bundled safely off to his lessons, she put her plan in action. She'd chosen only the best for her darling, green brocade and black silk and a tiny spatter of red trim here and there to liven up the shoes and hose, breeches, shirt, waistcoat, ribbon tie and long coat.

Scissors and a length of velvet ribbon she stole from the sewing basket, and had the lot waiting on the bed and at the dressing-table when she ushered her darling one in.

"There, you see?" she said, standing behind and resting her chin on Louisa's shoulder and her hands on Louisa's waist. "I'm as good as my word. Are you?"

Louisa's face tightened with some opaque thought or worry before she answered. "You would truly have me dress this way? As a--” (silent struggle) "--as you do?"

As if she were some manner of aberration. Louisa had called her handsome, approved of the necessity of a chaperone, but underneath. "That was the plan." She kept her voice pleasant, smooth. Daring reproach. "Well?"

She could feel Louisa fidgeting, her hands closing around one another as if there were nothing else in the wide world to hold onto. "May I have some privacy?"

That hurt worse than any of it. "You may not," she snapped. "I need to make sure you've put it on right." 

"Of course." Her sigh of resignation might as well have been a shudder of revulsion as she stepped free of Lestat, looking at the garments as if they were alien things.

"Wait!" Lestat stopped her as she reached for the shirt. Almost bungling it again, she had a talent. "Your hair. Your hair first."

Louisa's hands went to her long braid, protective, and Lestat's tempter sprang up again. "It will grow back, you idiot! Do you want to give the game away before you've even stepped outside?"

"Can we not simply tuck it away? Surely no one will look closely," Louisa tried, and Lestat tossed the scissors down in disgust.

"Your womanly vanity makes trouble of everything." Her unwarranted modesty, more like--as though that profile could ever go unnoticed in a crowd.

"I thought you  _ liked _ the way I looked! You chose half of it!"

"And now I'm choosing this."

Louisa crept close like the mouse she wasn't, chewing her lip. "You would... prefer me that way? Less womanly?"

"I would  _ prefer _ for you to stop questioning me every damned step of the way. You did agree to this, did you not?"

"Yes." Her voice was quieter than usual when she sat down and released her grip on the braid. It swung free, falling below the level of the seat, and was so fragrant and shining that Lestat had to stop herself from untying and brushing it purely for her own enjoyment. (They so rarely had time for that, and what a waste it was.)

"Sit up straight," she said instead, looping a bit of string behind it near the shoulder blades. "How can I cut it evenly when you slouch so?"

Louisa said nothing, simply rose into an attitude of perfect poise and stared into her own eyes in the mirror. Lestat tied off the string and then, with a swishing sound, the thick, heavy plait fell to the floor like a coiled snake in the swamps.

Louisa wasn't quick enough to hide her flinch, the cringe as if Lestat had severed her arm and not some dead vanity. Lestat made quick work of the rest of it, brushing the soft curls that remained about her shoulders into something presentable for their stature. 

Every few minutes Louisa's fingertips would rise to brush the shortened ends, feeling blindly over every strand. When it was done, she picked up the braid and cradled it to her chest. 

"I told you it grows back, didn't I? Stop mourning." Acting like it was her 'crowning glory,' or whatever nonsense they put into women's heads these days to hold them down. "We'll lose the whole night if you don't hurry up." 

One article at a time, slow as if they were some unknown relics, Louisa did as she was told. Every few minutes Lestat would stop her to fuss at a tie or the crease of a collar, relishing in the simple intimacy of touch. In how easily she could take it. 

And when it was done...

Louisa was a picture, that much was true. Her short hair curled appealingly around the sharp point of her chin, and the cut of the breeches favored her narrow waist and fine, delicate legs. 

But no fool, blind and deaf, would ever take her for a man.

"Well?" Louisa prompted, with a tilt of her head, and every move was more proof of how disastrous an idea this had been. She was too fluid, too graceful; her body contained itself and only tentatively moved through even the piece of the world she owned.

A woman who could occupy so little space in a hoop-skirt was downright  _ insubstantial _ in clothing as close-fit as breeches. Lestat looked like a beautiful young man, but Louisa looked...

Uncomfortable. Determined. Hopeful, even, at first, twisting a tragically coquettish finger in a strand of hair already come loose from the tail Lestat had engineered. She gazed from under her eyelashes more bashfully than any boy ever would.

It sickened Lestat, that painfully obvious pretense, and she stared too long at her try-hard girl-in-boy's-clothes. Until the girl quailed, and the hope flickered (it should, it was hopeless--) and then Louisa looked into the glass.

And then it was all over.

"Oh," was all she said at first.  _ Oh _ , as if she had been shot, and the weight of it was just beginning to sink in. And then her hands came to her mouth, her face, and she backed away from the reflection. 

"Well," Lestat tried, "that puts paid to that. You'll simply have to take my word for it." She's always been the one to face the world, to keep it from wrapping its hands around her Southern belle. 

"Was this your intent?" Louisa's voice was soft and dull, but Lestat never missed it. Her ears were tuned to its music, always. "To punish me? To show that I will always need you?"

"This is hardly the reason you need me." What that reason was Lestat was afraid to say, always hoping Louisa would fill in that gulf of terror. That always lurking loneliness. She sat on the bed, tugging at the end of Louisa's disheveled tail. "And you do look ravishing, my dear."

"I look ridiculous. I can't even--" she turned her head away, and the movement sent her shorn hair slipping from Lestat's grasp. "Don't leave me for this."

Shock came only slowly, after a too-long interval trying to make sense of the words.

"Louisa--"

"Louisa. Not  _ Louis _ ," she spat, then closed her eyes in a reflexive defense, and why did this make a difference? She was no different a woman than when in a housedress or evening gown, hair up or braided or (so rarely) a thick flowing cape for Lestat's fingers to run through. She was no less or more breakable than when Lestat stripped her and ravaged her. But her long neck was hidden by a cravat, her long hair shorn, and her face so very lost.

And she'd asked Lestat to  _ stay _ . Which begged a worse question:

"Ma cherie, why would I ever leave you, for anything?" Her jaw was so perfect a fit for the span of Lestat's thumb and forefinger, one learned over nearly three-quarters of a century.

"I cannot be a man for you. But I will try harder, work to be what I  _ can _ \--send me to the men, put me to use as temptation, just  _ love _ me and our son. I want not protection, but--"

Again Lestat saw no tears to accompany the alien sadness and incomprehensible words. The satin lips stilled at her touch, but so did all sentience in the eyes.

"Never." She tilted Louisa's face toward her, coming close until their foreheads touched. "Their hands will never touch you. I would leave a trail of corpses across the city first." And so she had done in the past, basking in the buzz of the press. 

"Then why play this game?" 

_ Game _ . Yes, that was what it was; part of the whole farce of their existence. All of it but Louisa, who had burrowed dangerously near to the soft and unguarded pieces of Lestat's heart. "This place consumes you. Your musty books. Your little chair. You rot here."

"I haven't your taste for killing." And wasn't that a farce. Lestat had seen her kill, seen the rapture and reverence she applied to the act.

"And did you choose life for nothing? Is my company so unbearable, that you would spend your eternity here?"

"I did not choose life," that low, smooth voice replied. "Nor death, nor killing. I chose  _ you _ , and now I know how little you need anything but what I give you. I hated it, once, but have made peace. It's what I was born to, after all." Why had Lestat never seen bravery in the moments when large, intelligent eyes actually met her own? "So use me and my money, if that's my worth. I don't care any longer. My vanity is gone." Again her hand rose to fiddle with the cut ends, that lovely little tail that so changed her face in ways the braid and updos did not.

Lestat captured the wrist, and was disturbed by how the fight went out with her touch.

"Louisa. This is frivolous. It will  _ grow back. _ " Impatience tinged her tone, despite her worry at the madness she was hearing.

"Twenty-five  _ years _ ," Louisa said. "It will be a century since we met, by the time it's as it should be. And you don't even like it this way." She trembled suddenly, moved to press her face to Lestat's neck. "Does your musician look boyish? Is she more--acceptable?"

"What?" She blanched at the mention of her little reprieve, doting Antoinette and her music and her anger. A ghost brought back to life to be nurtured. It wasn't Louisa's to meddle with, it wasn't her  _ place _ , it was--"What are you--it'll be back by sundown, you perfect idiot!"

"How is that possible?" It was so easy to give her hope, and to take it.

"You needn't know." Lestat didn't, after all. "You'll see for yourself. Every night you rise from your coffin, you'll be just the same as you were when you died." Still mournful, still secret. Still in love, if there was any kindness in this savage garden. 

"Then this," her quick mind was so slow in accepting the possibility that Lestat hadn't acted out of cruelty. "This will be healed?"

"I've already told you," she huffed, but her arms came up to encircle her darling. "There's no need for this ridiculous wailing. It was a night's fancy. There would be an infinite number of them, if you'd only come with me." 

"To your mortal's house?" 

She always had to push. "Not there. Never there, you understand? I offer you all the world, and you'd have the one forbidden fruit." But after all, wasn't that what Lestat loved about her?

She nodded in fatigued fashion, smile as eerie as any had ever been.

"I offer you myself and my holdings, and you'd leave it in the gutter." A soft huff. "Where you found me; all I'm worthy of, I suppose." And then one of Louisa's hands went to the fastenings of Lestat's clothes, while the other tangled in her hair. "So treat me like what I am."

Her kisses were so sweet, given like this, and she hardly struggled when Lestat forced her away from the buttons.

"My wife?" Lestat whispered betweentimes, laying her upon the bed and marveling at the ease of slipping between legs clad in breeches rather than layers of flowing skirts.

Louisa froze.

What  _ now _ , she wanted to snap. But even her indelicate senses could feel something fragile on the air, something she'd go far indeed to keep from breaking. "Didn't I give you my ring?" she said instead. 

"For propriety."

"Hang propriety. I'll dance naked in the streets if I like." Like her mother, imagining herself as a grand spectacle fucking all comers in the town square just to anger her father. She never could escape. "I gave it because I wanted you to have it." 

"To keep me with you." Her gaze was retreating again, looking somewhere over Lestat's shoulder. 

"What else are the damned things for?" She wasn't built for these courtroom arguments, prattling on about semantics when the intent was there in plain letters. "I haven't given rings to any mortals, you'll notice." Nor even to Nicki. She collapsed, letting herself have one moment of softness with her head pressed to Louisa's neck. 

"Lestat." Louisa's hands touched as if she were a feral, wounded animal, tentative along her back and hips.

"Yes, mon amour?" So close, her voice was muffled by her beloved one's very flesh, combined with the scents of fresh silk and cotton and linen. Suddenly the cravat and collar seemed an impossible barrier, one she pawed at halfheartedly without raising her face from that familiar crevice.

"I didn't know you cared." An old, old joke, and perhaps at her sharpest, Lestat might have heard the pained truth to it.

She would regret, later, that she just smiled and curled closer before lying with extravagance borne of a too-near truth:

"As you know, my own, there has never been room in my heart for any woman but you."

"Your own. Your wife..." Louisa said, turning to one side. "But you are not mine in return, are you? Is that the way of it?"

"Speak plainly, Louisa. You know I've no head for your intellectual riddles," Lestat said waspishly, hand going to the silk tie she'd chosen so carefully for the ensemble. Like a splash of blood at that throat.

(She might have been a fool to think Louisa would appear as a man when these clothes went on, but she'd always known how they'd come off.)

And miracle of miracles, Louisa didn't fight her. Reached up, instead, and helped to remove it, arching into Lestat's touch.

"I'll be yours," Louisa said as their fingers tangled in the bit of red ribbon. "It's all I've wanted--just to know you would not leave."

It hadn't always been this way. Once Louisa had been reticent, fierce about her own little space and drifting ever further from Lestat's grasp. And she had killed that urge, with a child and with (she hoped) her own charm, leaving the creature now in her arms. 

"I promised, never." Promises meant so little to their kind, who were vicious beasts one and all. "My heart would stop its beating without you." A dangerous ploy, to make herself vulnerable. To be caught. 

But the reward paid the price and more: her hesitant darling reaching up to cup her face, to draw her into a kiss. Perfect, all of it. So dangerously perfect.

"Whatever you say," Louisa's cherry lips whispered when they broke, and she tilted her head back in an invitation too urgent to answer. Not when she could instead be savoured.

"I say I'll make love to you as you've never felt it before." Such a little gasp--such a sweet sound of anticipation.

And the longer Lestat touched and admired Louisa in this garb, the less Louisa seemed a raw wound of Lestat's, a girl playing at dress-up. Instead, she seemed just a beautiful woman, dressed in clothes that revealed all they covered and flattered her in ways forbidden. So wondrous, how she pressed her hips towards Lestat's; it was so so easy to slide one of her own limbs between, lift her to sit on Lestat's long, lean thigh with her back to Lestat's chest, short hair a cloud.

"Magnificent." Her fingers plucked at the buttons of Louisa's vest, stole up beneath the long shirt to the soft, unfettered prize beneath. Gentle. Tonight she could be gentle; it was easy with the sounds falling like jewels from Louisa's lips, the demure sighs slipping in spite of themselves into moans as Lestat made playthings of sensitive nipples. 

Louisa's music made Antoinette's seem pedestrian and dreary. Made, for a moment, Nicki a mere memory instead of a ghost wrapped round her throat. 

"Tell me." She mapped blueblooded veins with her tongue, pushing against white linen. "Tell me what it is you want." Louisa's hair smelled of rain, eternally silken and soft. 

"Nothing." Louisa's hand covered Lestat's over top of her shirt, holding her. Constraining her, and Lestat allowed it. "Just stay."

"Always, my love. My precious treasure." Lestat's own voice shook now, just a bit. "But come now. Surely there is some little thing you enjoy, something I can do to give you pleasure?"

"I don't--" she wriggled, and it was delicious, the hitch in her voice. "I don't know. I don't--what should I say?"

Lestat squeezed, soft and slow, at the fullness against which her hand was held. Louisa's own fingers slipped to interlace and aid, the linen separating them a strange and textured barrier.

"Tell the truth. What do you want?"

She ran her free hand down the front of her prize's breeches (what a thought!), along the now-undulating hip to the bent knee in its near-transparent green stocking, so vivid above the handsome heeled black shoe.

Louisa moved like a woman who'd never died.

"I want..." 

"Anything." Their bodies moved in imitation of love making, their clothes only one barrier among many. 

"I want to know you." 

Lestat captured her lips, swallowing words she couldn't abide, thoughts that would destroy them. "And so you shall." Experience was the best teacher in life, the only one worth knowing. She'd learned that well enough. 

If there was a defeated slump to Louisa's shoulders as she leaned into the kiss, a mournful sigh as Lestat lay her down and lavished her with sweet, slow kisses, well... From such an angle, it was nearly happiness.


	5. Furnish Forth the Marriage Tables

There had been a finality in the air for months now. Since their little peace had shattered with Claude's innocence, the blue eyes that watched her faithfully now filled up with cunning and thoughts he kept for himself. Unease prevailed, and more and more Lestat would escape to her musician's house--some nights, they mightn't see her at all. And in spite of herself, in spite of all that had come and the endless fighting, Louisa missed her touch.

But it was Claude who put his hand on hers that night, staring up from that cherubic face, from those blue lights like wisps. "You're wasting your thoughts."

"How have you become an expert on my private musings?" She meant to tease, but it came out sharper than expected.

"I know you better than you know yourself," he replied with total seriousness.

The confidence and certainty in his tone were disconcerting; he was her son, but the statement felt wrong, as wrong as his baby blue eyes on her.

"Well, I suppose there's little enough to know," she said with a laugh, high and sharp. Evasive. And his face screwed up into a thunderstorm that would have been charmingly overserious on an ordinary child.

"Do not put me off so, Louisa. I can see clear as a photograph how she's used you, until you'll take even those scraps and thank her for how she mocks you--if there's little there, it's because you're crushed small within her grasp."

His teeth were ugly when bared in a strange, adult smile. "Even now, you're wishing you could take the place of her piece of meat, as though that would make you less a prisoner."

"Claude!" she snapped. "I didn't raise you to say such vulgar things." 

"No," he agreed, mild and meek. "That was Lestat's doing. A vulgar woman through and through, no matter how she pretends. But I was raised nonetheless." He brought her hand to his and kissed it. "And that part of your work is over now." 

"You will always be my child." That was what mothers said, wasn't it? Mothers who didn't wish their children dead when they were already on their deathbeds. 

His face darkened further. "Because of her. Her little act has blinded you. She suffocates us, playing as if we were dolls. We've outgrown it, Louisa. It's time we made our own way." 

"You know she'd never allow that." A horrid thing to say, and yet there was such comfort in it.

"And who is she to decide such things?" Claude stepped onto the ottoman, and from there into her lap with half a century's practiced ease. His little legs went to either side of hers, and his hands on her cheeks were warm with whatever unfortunate he'd supped from in the early hours of the evening. "I am a man, Louisa. I shall make my own way at last. It's up to you whether you stand with me, or submit to your perverse mistress and let her do as she will."

He had so little strength, but she knew not how to resist when he turned her face in his grasp to place a damp kiss just below her ear.

"Claude--"

"Your choice," he said, sliding down her body (her torso, then her legs), to return to the floor. "Leave this place for a few hours, and consider.  _ Mother _ ."

A feeling of deep disquiet gnawed at her, watching her no-longer-child saunter with utter self-possession out of the room. And God help her, she did as she was told. She'd grown so talented at it. 

The streets held no comfort, not in the bright window-lit shops or the hunger-starved faces they illuminated in the streets; not in the embrace of some unfortunate man, old and broken by a life of labor.  _ Angel _ , he called her as he grew still in her arms. She was nothing of the sort. 

She thought for a moment of finding Lestat and her musician, begging to speak with them and laying out her concerns. But her head kept going. Saw Lestat laughing at her, arms around her pretty, talented mortal dear. Threatening to put an end to her child, and to leave her out in the streets (she'd wanted that at some point, but when...). 

Her feet took her instead back to the Rue Royale, and the warm, deceptive lights in its window.

Claude had changed his clothes; he wore, now, his loveliest little black suit, insincere 'mourning' garb worn during those times when he and Lestat were between them tearing a favored family to pieces with hunger. He'd turned up the lamps so that his features gleamed, almost haloed by the light, and his smile was sweet and guileless as she entered.

"And here you are, my love. I regret if I made you uncomfortable, earlier; you did raise me better than such language." He held out a package wrapped in marbled paper. "I thought you'd like to read here for a while, this evening, while we await Lestat's return."

She didn't ask where he'd come by the book, or the money to purchase it--the answer was always blood and theft, in the end. She simply opened it, and was a hundred pages into Collins' tale of murder, intrigue, and a captive woman's stolen fortunes by the time the door creaked open.

(She buried the impulse to hide her little pleasure, the 'girlish trash' she read.)

"Here at last," Claude opened his arms, playing host in another's home. "You're so mysterious in your habits of late." 

Lestat paused in the removal of her coat (thick and doubly padded; flattening). "What business is it of yours what I do or where I go?" Her shoulders were set, preparing for a fight. Louisa was often baffled by Lestat's moods, but Claude seemed able to steer them as easily as a matador waving his cape. 

"Of course," he replied, smiling with dimpled cheeks. "The master of the house keeps their own council." He dared a step forward, eyes averted and docile. "I had only hoped you might not miss your gift." 

"Gift," Lestat repeated, wary. "What the devil are you on about?"

"A token of my esteem for you. A gentleman rises above petty squabbles; that's what you taught me." 

Lestat seemed caught at that, strung between her petulance and a charade that wasn't any longer. Claude rushed to sweeten the deal. "You do so much for those in your care. I only wanted to return the favor."

"Louisa?" Lestat's grey eyes were glazed and shining, plain evidence that she'd already enjoyed mortal passions and secondhand drink this evening. (And music, musn't forget that. Her new lover had not money, but  _ talent _ to recommend her, which made the girl more worth eternity than ever Louisa had been.) "Did you put him up to this?"

"No, not at all," she demurred, pushing down her fears and fanning the tiny, foolish flame of hope. If they could but reconcile--find some balance--then she could adapt, as animals did to adverse environments. (Or predators.) "As you see, he's brought gifts all around tonight." Holding up the book was a mistake; it caused those luminous eyes to narrow, gold brows angling suspiciously down.

"Has he--"

"Yes, Lestat, but I think you'll find yours far more interesting than  _ that _ ," Claude said, reaching up for Lestat's elbow and tugging gently in the direction of their drawing room. "I know your tastes well, after all."

Louisa found herself drawn after them, seemingly forgotten and yet bound to playing witness. Claude had set the sitting room with a fine china tea set, cups half emptied and a plate of delicate cakes upset. Sitting on the embroidered loveseat (she remembered that one: Lestat had made a gift of it, back when she had put effort into her false platitudes) were two young women, eyes closed and heads lolled together. They were lovely and warm with life, frozen on the cusp of becoming adults--narrow and uncurved yet in their forms, one dressed in tattered satin suited to a noble lady, the other still fitted as one of the errand boys on the street. Boyish, both of them, with their thin limbs going knobby at the joints. For all their finery, they couldn't have had a meal even as paltry as this in weeks. 

Lestat's face went soft and fond, and Louisa and Claude both saw it. Saw her come near and stroke the girls’ hair, feeling their flushed cheeks with such tenderness Louisa was all the more convinced she was in some waking dream. 

"Poor waifs," Claude broke in, head lowered. "I only wanted to be kind to them. It seems they're unused to such things." He nodded to the small silver flask set beside the teapot, wafting the smell of brandy.

"Why Claude, you've learnt the rake's playbook already, have you?" Lestat said with a thin laugh, merry as she sometimes was and spilling energy from the fingertips that danced atop his head. Claude's face flashed irritation at the patronizing pats, but Lestat, spellbound, missed it.

"First rule:  _ always _ convince the ladies that it's a kindness you do." Her hair fell artfully to curtain her face as she continued, "And second, always ensure they're utterly intoxicated before you ruin them."

Something empty, something broken in Lestat's lovely clear voice took Louisa back to the darkness of an alley and the arms of her Angel. How she'd luxuriated in that ruination; how happy she'd been for that touch when she lay dying, even when she awoke to the horrors of life again.

And then Lestat's hands were moving, dancing over the doomed girls' beautiful damp foreheads, their translucent eyelids with the blue veins beneath. And then her lips, too, brushing kisses too wonderfully gentle ever to be visited on Louisa as she stroked their shiny curls, first one, then the other.

Once Louisa would have interceded, or tried to. But all that ever brought was misery for the poor sweet things, pain visited on them as punishment to her.

"I'd thought we could share," Claude said presently, slipping up between them lithe as a kitten, and Lestat's eyes refocused on him.

"Determined to have our share, are we, little prince?" Her laugh was longer, more frantic than the words called for. "Fine, fine. You've caught me in a forgiving mood." She made to bite down on one of the girls, cradled tenderly in her arms, and paused for a moment. Looked for the briefest flicker at Louisa and then back to Claude. "This is forgiveness then. For all of us." It wanted so badly to have the assertion of a statement, but the question hung regardless. 

"This will end all that has passed between us," Claude promised.

Only Louisa could see his little hands clasped behind his back and the way they tightened, grasping, in the seconds before Lestat's face smoothed. 

"To family, then," she smirked, and sank her teeth into the girl's neck. Louisa remembered that embrace, soft as only the dying could earn, rapturously intent and determined to cradle the source of that joy onto some softness that had never truly existed. 

Claude made as if to follow her lead, but his teeth never broke skin, and eventually he set back to watch her. Calm. Unmoved. 

She came up for air she didn't need, staring at him. "Cold feet?" Her voice was thick, and Louisa told herself it was just the blood in her mouth. 

"Oh, no. I've had my fill is all." He nudged the shoulder of the boyish girl, watching as she tumbled from the loveseat like a ragdoll. "Pretenders leave a poor taste in my mouth."

"What have you--" She made a sound, odd, hacking, and blood dribbled from her mouth as though she couldn't feel it.

"Just a little something to make them feel  _ better _ ," he said mock-sweetly, tugging the girl from Lestat's grasp and stroking curiously knowing hands along her gashed throat. "They were coughing, you see. Feeling poorly. And everyone knows laudanum is a capital cure, hmm?"

Her silken skin was moon-pale and still he stroked it, still he gathered her little corpse (twice his size) up and cuddled it.

"Drugged--you've  _ drugged _ me!" Her words were slurred, garbled, and she reeled back on her knees, one hand reaching out. "Louisa, help me!"

"Don't, Louisa," Claude said coolly, dipping a fingertip in the girl’s slow-dripping slit and licking a taste of her. And then she, too, fell to join her companion, and he hopped down with the unused table knife in hand. "Not if you love me."

And she stood paralyzed by the words, by the panic in her Lestat's beautiful lying cheating eyes, because this was too far.

_ This _ Lestat would not forgive; not just the attempt, but the humiliation, as he slashed her singer's throat and then her clothes, exposing her chest for the blood to pour down. (Too much blood, impossibly much, as if it were being  _ pushed _ out of her body; her fingers grew thin and the rings Louisa had paid for rolled freely off into the spreading puddle.)

And then his hand went to her breeches as she writhed, and Louisa swept him up and away and squeezed her eyes shut against the sight of what he'd done.

"It's not finished," he was saying against her ear, as the gurgling quieted and the horrible thing that had been Lestat went still. "We have to deal with the body."

"You did this." She set him down again, arms wrapping around herself as she sank into the chair where she'd watched it all. "You bear it. I cannot." 

"Don't be a fool," he snapped before gentling, coming to coax her. "Louisa, I can't lift it. Don't you understand? I need you. I've always needed you, in so many ways. She was suffocating you." His bloody hands stained her dress, cupped her face and brought it down to look at him. "It's all but done now, my love. We only need to free ourselves of the memory." 

Blue eyes, piercing and hard; grey eyes, cloudy and dull and staring blankly at the ceiling with mouth agape. She couldn't look at the shriveled horror of it, even as she picked it up and found it weighed nothing in her arms. Even as she wrapped her shawl around the creature's bare chest, bloody and ruined under the table cloth Claude proclaimed a burial shroud. 

They went together to the swamp, Louisa dull and distant from her own mind as they sent the bundle of bones and meat down into the depth. Claude turned away as soon as they let go, returning to the carriage. But Louisa watched until it sank out of sight: almost a century, of misery and joy and regret, the white light of it blinking out of sight in the muck. And as it went out, something in her did too.


End file.
